2022 CoCo Election: Pey Lian Lim

Hello! I am honored to accept the nomination for the Astropy Coordination Committee.

I am a Software Engineer at STScI, specializing in data analysis tools in the open-source world. I think my first real involvement with Astropy was when Perry Greenfield asked me to open a PR to add conesearch to the core library all those years ago and then I just stayed on and ended up working on different parts of the project over the years. Fun fact: I had since moved conesearch to astroquery and now Tom Donaldson is looking into taking it out of astroquery and integrating/replacing with pyvo. :smiley:

Currently, I am active in operations/infrastructure (or maybe I will say “devops” when I want to be hip or “please rebase” when I want to be scary) and a core maintainer (general, io.votable, utils), as you can see over at Astropy Team page. I am also an Astropy Affiliated Package co-editor alongside Derek Homeier.

If I were to be elected into CoCo, I would advocate for Astropy to work with larger OSS efforts, where the goals align; For instance, collaborating with the new Scientific Python coalition (it is under NumFOCUS too) and maybe adopting/contributing to Numpy’s Contributor Experience Handbook that is under development.

Other things on my wish list (though I do not have clear solutions for) include but not limited to onboarding/retaining software developers from other institutions/universities that also heavily use Astropy, helping graduate students convince their advisors that their Astropy contributions is just as valuable as traditional research, having a pathway to train the next generation of CoCo and core maintainers, and more bots.

The Astropy Project has grown so much that I realize I often have quite a narrow view of the whole picture. For instance, I recognize the importance of tutorials and financial handling but working on them is just not as great a passion for me. Thus, in the areas I am lacking, I would need to rely on others in the Project to fill those gaps.

I would like to disclose that I do work at the same institution as Erik Tollerud, another CoCo member. APE 0 does say, “Unless it would be short of candidates otherwise, it should not have more than one member from any particular employer.”

I also apologize for all the stress I have caused by saying, “Please rebase and squash.”

tl;dr – YMMV