Remove Juan Luis from astropy.coordinates

[astrojuanlu]

Sadly reflecting on paper the current reality 😢 Already sent an email to coordinators@ giving more details about my reasoning and expressing my gratitude and appreciation for the project.

[astrojuanlu]

Sharing in the open the reasons for my decision (thanks @hamogu for the nudge!)

Astropy is very close to my heart and I've been lucky enough to meet you folks in person and earn your trust, so I'd like to share a bit more detail on the reasons why -- both to express my appreciation for the project and to give a data point for "the leaky pipeline of contributors".

My tenure has been sparse and short-lived: I did some tiny contributions in 2014 two years after I discovered astropy 0.1, then my epic ecliptic fix in 2017, more ecliptic frames stuff in 2019, and got the opportunity to get paid as a maintainer (also for coordinates-benchmark) in the second half of 2020. I am proud of these contributions but also realize that working in a project the size of Astropy, with the complexity and backwards compatibility promises that come with its sheer success, required way more sustained focus and concentration than what I could bring to the table.

Being in the industry, my open source work has always been, at best slightly misaligned, at worst completely disconnected, from the rest of my professional life. Even when I managed to land in a space startup that was using poliastro and Astropy for some tasks, I never really got to be part of the teams doing analysis or design work, but rather in operations. This fast-paced environment and chaotic schedule ended up stealing all my energy, and my open source projects suffered. I think this might be true for other folks as well.

During the pandemic I reconsidered lots of life choices, and I am now professionally doing "glue work" at Read the Docs, which is something that, to my surprise, I like even more than coding. I'm trying to make myself a "project manager" for poliastro, doing less feature work and more coordination, onboarding, and fundraising. I'm enjoying it but I have so, so much to learn in this space (pun intended).

I'll still be available for pings everywhere of course, and I'll try to pay more attention to documentation issues affecting Astropy (I have some unread notifications I want to address sooner rather than later).

Ad astra!