Saturday, November 9, 2019

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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