Hackday report: Text for NSIDC DAAC Weekly report

[andypbarrett]

Amanda asked me to provide a report on our hackday for the NSIDC-DAAC weekly report. Here's what I wrote. I figured it would be good to preserve that report here. Feel free to add further thoughts.

earthaccess hackday

On Thursday 10 October, a group of earthaccess contributors, who had
been attending the NSIDC-DAAC User Working Group meeting on the
previous two days, or lived local to Boulder, met for a hackday to discuss development plans for
earthaccess. In attendence were Luis Lopez (creator of
earthaccess, NSIDC), Jessica Schieck (creator of icepyx, U. New
Hampshire), Tyler Sutterly (U. Washington and Applied Physics Lab),
Tasha Snow (co-PI for CryoCloud), Mikela Beig (NSIDC-DAAC), and Andy
Barrett (NSIDC-DAAC). Work focused on building the framework for a
variable-first database. This stems from challenges encountered with
programmatic access to complex ICESat-2 data products, some of which
contain over 1000 variables in multiple groups. Users need to have
in-depth knowledge of each product or dig through data dictionaries or
ATBDs to find the path for each variable within each file. A
searchable variable database could streamline access to data.

The icepyx package is "dataset aware" for ICESat-2 products, and
contains variable databases for each product. However, these need to
be updated with each new version. The earthaccess variable
database, earthdb,
will build tooling to automatically create a variable database for all
datasets in CMR. This database will be loaded as an optional backend
into earthaccess to allow variable searching and access. Much of
the work focused on developing the concept and infrastructure for
software development. The hackday team created a Github organization
earthaccess-contrib. This organization will provide a place to
organize earthaccess backend packages, which is the community agreed
method to extend non-core earthaccess capabilities. The team also
started to explore methods to build the database. Work will continue
as part of biweekly earthaccess hackdays facilitated by NASA
Openscapes.

[JessicaS11]

A belated thank you, @andypbarrett, for this excellent writeup! I don't have anything to add other than excitement to keep this effort moving forward.