GSoC 2025: Final Submission and a Look Ahead

And with that, the Google Summer of Code 2025 coding period comes to a close. I’ve just submitted my final term report for the RIPPLe project, marking the culmination of an intense and incredibly rewarding four-month journey.

Looking back to May, I remember the steep learning curve of just setting up the LSST Science Pipelines environment. The initial weeks were a deep dive into the complexities of the Butler, its data repositories, and the unique coordinate systems used by the Rubin Observatory. There were moments of frustration, especially when dealing with environment configurations and performance bottlenecks, but each challenge was a significant learning opportunity. From the excitement of the first successful end-to-end pipeline run to the satisfaction of optimising the workflow and seeing the processing time drop from hours to minutes, this project has been a masterclass in building real-world scientific software.

The result of this effort is RIPPLe: a robust, configurable pipeline that successfully bridges the gap between LSST's vast data archive and the powerful machine learning models of the DeepLense project. The codebase is available at the following locations:

• Main Repository: https://github.com/ML4SCI/DeepLense/tree/main/DeepLense_Data_Processing_Pipeline_for_the_LSST

• Development Fork (for integration): https://github.com/kartikmandar/RIPPLe

This journey would not have been possible without the incredible guidance from my mentors: Michael Toomey, Sergei Gleyzer, Anna Parul, and Lucca Paris. Their expertise, patience, and encouragement were invaluable, and I am immensely grateful for their support. I also want to extend a huge thank you to the entire ML4Sci organisation for providing this platform to contribute to meaningful, open-source science.

Although the GSoC period may have ended, my work on this project continues. I am excited to continue contributing to the DeepLense team and building upon the foundation we've established with RIPPLe. I plan to remain an active member of the community and will continue attending the weekly meetings, which take place on Wednesdays.

My immediate next step is to spend this upcoming week rebasing the codebase to prepare it for a project presentation. The work continues, and I couldn't be more excited for what's next. Thank you to everyone who followed along on this journey.