Saturday, December 7, 2019

Telescope: Up and Running


Yes, Telescope is ready to start taking its first steps!

After a couple of weeks of hard work, Telescope has finally become a functional piece of software. All the elements, or I should say all the effort made by all the contributors, was finally put together and now it is possible to run telescope and see it do what it was created for.

This is really awesome, seriously. Running Telescope and being able to read posts on it is amazing. Here, take a look:





This has been so far a really awesome experience. The learning process, the collaboration, the enthusiasm from all the people involved... I'm very happy that this project exists, and I'm even happier that I'll be able to keep working on it.

As I said, the last couple of weeks were crucial to be able to get to where Telescope is right now. The components responsible for fetching feeds, process and store them in our database were connected to the front end through our web server, using 2 endpoints that I added. I had a lot of fun adding those 2 endpoints and tests for them. I had to learn about how to implement paging and adding link headers to the server's response, and a little bit of redis, which were both completely new to me, and added valuable knowledge to be used in the future. I also had the chance to get involved with the docker side of the project. 2 awesome contributors worked hard to add redis and SAML2 support to our docker workflow, and I was fortunate enough to have the chance to add some suggestions and comments here and there.

I think I have a better understanding of how redis and SAML2 can be incorporated to a project, and although I've worked with docker before, I feel more confident about using it now. That's also another part of this project that makes it so valuable. I started contributing to Telescope at the very beginning, and just by reviewing other people's work, I had the chance to learn so many new things. As an example, before telescope, my relationship with CI was almost non existent, but just by reading other people's code, their comments, and following all the steps they had to go through to add CI to Telescope, I'm ready to start adding my own contributions in this area. That right there is invaluable experience for my future in this industry.

So there it is, Telescope is really getting there. Yes, bugs will come up, adjustments will have to be made, but it is ready to see it work and do what it's meant to do. Isn't it exciting?

Good hacking and have fun!
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