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Home / Posts / First Interactions with TARDIS

First Interactions with TARDIS

2 minutes
March 13, 2021

My first introduction to TARDIS was due to my involvement in the Professorial Assistantship program at MSU, which allowed me as a freshman to start doing research. I was placed with TARDIS due to my interest in understanding how the world works and my enjoyment of math.

After I had finished my crash course of Python 2 (TARDIS is written in Python 3, but Python 2 was free) through CodeAcademy, I was given my first task. This task was meant to gauge my effectiveness in programming, so I was given a relatively simple task. I had to convert a program that was mostly written in Cython, which tries to speed up Python by using C conventions, to Numba, a just-in-time compiler.

This program was originally written in Cython to help make it faster, but the decision was made to convert it to Numba so it would be even faster, as speed is very important with TARDIS. I was able to work my way through most of the conversion in a few days, but I got hung up due to my inexperience. One of the checks is to make sure that the results are the same with both processes. My code was correct, but at the time I lacked a good understanding of types, especially in regards to types that you get when you import modules. This slowed me down immensely, and it took a few weeks for me to realize and then work with these types to create a test that showed that my code gave the same result. After a few weeks, I was able to create a test that would show that the code would output the same results, and my changes were merged. This was my first contribution to TARDIS, and a big achievement for me as I, as a freshman with only a month or so of coding experience, was able to commit and have an impact on TARDIS, which is seeking to help expand knowledge of the universe. It was an extremely memorable moment, as even though it was a small commitment, I was able to contribute and help improve TARDIS. This helped me feel like I belonged and remove some of the Imposter Syndrome that I was experiencing being around all of the experts in TARDIS.