Telescope: Quick Update

Telescope keeps growing, and soon we'll have to start thinking about putting all the pieces together.

Not much has happened lately in terms of new features or important milestones. I started researching how to use docker on Windows to be able to add all the steps to the documentation for contributors who use Windows as their main system (my condolences to you all), and soon I'll be adding 2 new endpoints to the back-end so all the pieces responsible for processing feeds will be connected to our database. I think it'll be an interesting and challenging task, but I'm really looking forward to it.

Oh, something interesting happened. Our CI broke, and the reason was the most unexpected one. It's not that our CI hadn't broken until this week, but it was always us. We've had problems with Windows CRLF, file paths, not mocking tests, but it was always us. But this week, a new version of node came out, and for some reason it broke all our tests. We managed to fix it by making our CI use the LTS version of node, but for someone like me who barely works with web technologies, this was very unexpected.

And that's pretty much it. In a few weeks, we might have all the different pieces working together and maybe it'll be time to start testing telescope as a whole. I can't wait for it!

As usual, good hacking and have fun!

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Telescope: growing faster than expected

Telescope has been alive for 2 weeks, and its development couldn't get more exciting!

I mentioned in a previous post how the project seemed to be a bit chaotic at the beginning, mostly because of the number of people involved in it and the different sets of skills and experience that each contributor has.

Well, that was last week. This week, we have a very enthusiastic group of developers exchanging ideas, offering help, being passionate about their contributions, and all that with a surprising level of organization completely unexpected (at least to me) for a group this big, and we're taking about between 50 and 60 people. As I said before, it's been fascinating to watch it grow, and I couldn't be happier to be part of it.

But there's more. At a personal level, I've been able to contribute to many parts of the project, and in may different ways! Back-end, containers, documentation, testing, CI... all that in just 2 weeks! In some cases, I added features that will enhance the capabilities of the project, in others I just made small changes or suggested someone a different approach for what they were working on. It's been a very enriching experience because not only I had to review and refresh previous knowledge to be able to offer some help, but also I had to do a significant amount of self-teaching so I could take on certain issues and complete some tasks.

So far:

• I added a tool to fetch data from Github, usign GitHub's API
• Implemented tests for that tool, using mock responses
• I tweaked our .eslint a little bit
• I fixed some linting errors
• And I tried to add husky to the project, but another contributor did a way better job, so it was better for the project to prioritize his pull request over mine

Also, I reviewed other people's contributions, I collaborated with other developers to add docker to the project and write documentation about how to use it, I gave some advice about how to add tests using mock responses... and this is only the beginning! In the next 2 weeks, I'll be able to do some more work, and the best part is that even if I'm not directly involved in some part of the project, I'll be able to review or at least take a look at what others did to solve some problem and learn a lot from it. What else could I ask for?

The only downside of all this is that I got a bit too distracted and I didn't contribute to another projects, as I was hoping to. My plan was to work on a PenguinV's issue, but since I didn't, I'll try to get it done this week, and hopefully take on another PenguinV's issue next week.

As usual, good hacking and have fun!

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Telescope: A tool for tracking blogs

Have you ever heard of PlanetCDOT?

Well, PlanetCDOT "is a collection of current blog posts by students, professors, and researchers at the Seneca Centre for Development of Open Technologies and related organizations around the world", and it has been around for a long time. The technology behind PlanetCDOT is Planet, "a feed aggregator application designed to collect posts from the weblogs of members of an internet community and display them on a single page", and according to the planet index page, it hasn't been updated in 13 years.

The good thing about software that hasn't been updated in more than a decade is that there's plenty if not all of the room for improvement, and now there's a project going on to create a new aggregator for PlanetCDOT.

This project is Telescope, and It's hard to describe what it is right now since what we have is a varied group of developers, with different set of skills, trying to put together a fairly complex piece of software. It started as a disjointed mess, but it's been fascinating to watch how the people involved in it started to file issues, submitting pull requests, reviewing other people's work, discussing approaches, all in a very organic and natural way,

I'm one of the lucky ones working on this project, and so far it's one of the most interesting collaborative experiences I've ever had. I must confess that I spend hours just watching the project grow, keeping track of how others review code, suggest solutions, help each other... and with watching I mean literally staring at the issue and pull request trackers to see the new additions. As I said, it's truly fascinating.

At the early stages of the project I thought I wanted to take care of .env files, using dotenv, but someone was faster than me and already solved that problem. My current intention (hopefully I'll be able to take care of this before someone else does) is to create a module that will fetch information related to a specific github repository/pull request/issue using GitHub's API. I have some experience with it, and since someone suggested that it could be a good addition to the project I thought it was a good fit for me.

I'm aware my description of Telescope is very vague, but I'd like to wait until a few more pieces get merged to the project, adding more functionality, and then I'll give more information about the features we'd like Telescope to have, and how the contributors are coming up with creative and interesting solutions.

Being part of Telescope is great, but I'd also like to work with other projects, and since my collaboration to PenguinV was welcomed, I think I'm going to try to take on another issue of theirs. This one is going to be tough!

As usual, good hacking and have fun!

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