Joel's Open Source Dev Blog

First, sorry for the lack of updates. I know I'm missing a lot of details from the previous Telescope post. But to sum it up, lots of new features and fixes were shipped throughout 2.8 and 2.9 but since 3.0 alpha which was released 2 weeks ago, we've had to shift our priorities towards the mainline features that were to be shipped in the 3.0 major release which we're shipping this week. Supabase Progress So we've finally got our own Supabase client running on staging, and we're planning to deploy it to production for 3.0 So that's really exciting.  Jerry has been lending a hand by coming up with more tables we can use for more info (i.e. github_data) Not only that but he's written a script to backup our Supabase/Postgres data in the events of a failure, that's really neat! This process involves starting a temporary container for the purpose of running the backup script. We've been migrating things like accounts and feeds to the Supabase tables. But w...

Fragments is a cloud-based microservice made with AWS services. This was our main assignments throughout the semester for CCP555 (which Dave also teaches) Gradually implementing Amazon web services to a basic web app made with nodeJS.  Fragments is a web app made to store and distribute small text and image files for a rhetorical company that require the fragments microservice to support their new system. As for it's architecture, it's pretty simple. At its core, its an express app, built to serve as an HTTP REST API for all the fragment operations. I'll try and detail the Amazon web Services used to support the app. Amazon Cognito So for authorization (which I've learned in this course is the most 'necessarily' complex topic to learn) we used Amazon's Cognito service. Cognito is so great for simplifying a lot of the authorization process instead of having to build it yourself from the ground up. In addition to the authentication that it provides, it stores ...

This week, we're heading into the planning phase of 2.9, which I am sheriff-ing again with my fellow coursemate Roxanne (Yes, I completely forgot to talk about 2.8 , I'm sorry!) and Telescope is increasingly becoming a different app as we reach 3.0 in a 4 weeks. Though I've landed a couple PRs and had a hand in shaping up the Supabase, I still feel like I haven't contributed enough. Well these last 2 releases are going to be vital and Dave's really emphasised on it. We need to start taking ownerships of our specific areas and specialties so that we can be more productive in these last 2 releases. So here are my plans for 2.9 Supabase Obviously should come to no surprise. I've been working with Duke and Dave for the past releases, and it's really been shaping up. This release we want to get the wheels rolling for Supabase and finally utilize it in Telescope production. So here's what's on the menu Docker Secrets First of all, we need to figure out a m...

What's up gang, sorry it took me a while to get back at writing this post. This one's gonna be a 2 part-er. This one's regarding my time as Sheriff during week 5 (Feb 5 - 12) Sheriffin Last week, as I mentioned in my previous blog post, Kevan and I had to sheriff the telescope repo for a week. And it was a great experience in taking charge of an open source project.  From having to look through release-scheduled PRs and Issues, to leading a meeting and speaking for 1 hour and 40 minutes (Felt like forever!), and really treating the Telescope project as your own, carrying the responsibility of maintaining and managing it. OUR Telescope As a Sheriff, you have to have some sort of ownership to the issues and PRs at hand. Even understanding only 50% of it is enough since the assignee should most definitely be able to explain the issue for you. (Big props to Dave, who would often clearly explain most of the issues in telescope right now) Once you know the context of the issue/P...

Howdy, You are speaking to this week's Telescope Sheriff's. That means I (along with my fellow OSD peer Kevan) carry the responsibility of leading the maintenance of the Open Source Telescope repository. That includes, reviewing PRs, filing issues, following up on backlogs, and more. Tomorrow we'll be having our OSD700 class where it really just is one big meeting or status update on everyone's tasks.  In that meeting, we summarize the progress of our big topics(which right now includes Supabase, React Native, new Services, just to name a few), follow ups on the issues set up for the next minor release (2.7) next week, and just updates on what everyone's tasks are or how their progress is going. It'll be my first time trying to lead a big team of developers (most of them who are way more skilled/knowledgeable than I am) so I hope I can lead it in the right direction. Either way it'll be really good project managing experience. OSD700 Last week, after jumping...

Deploying on a Thursday So Telescope 2.6.0 is dated to release on Thursday and we got a whole backlog of issues and PRs set for its milestone. As everyone gets to work on helping meet those tasks, I've done a little bit of my own to lend my hand in making the next minor version for Telescope Jr. (2.0) PR #2758 So I landed my first PR this semester, which involves just modifying a string to remove any non characters for the avatar initials on Telescope. Not gonna lie I misunderstood the issue at first and was looking too deep into it trying to figure out every use case. Dave clarified that it's not about any specific formatting and that he was just suggesting that we should eliminate any non characters so the Initials stay clean and alphabetized.  This sort of made me realize that  I've been overthinking the solutions for a lot of the issues I've been assigned to, and that can easily overwhelm the mental and really discourage you.  It's better to keep the issue at a ...