OSD700 So far

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It's the 3rd week

Of the semester already and nothing is slowing down... In fact it seems like everything's picking up the pace and I'm not doing myself any favours... Telescope's has gone through an iteration (2.5.0 last Thursday) and I haven't gotten around to making any meaningful contributions yet. Though I haven't written or pushed any code recently, I'd like to think I'm planning out and scoping my work for it.

Telescope

Is a pretty big project with lots of moving parts. It's seen a major version release since I last worked on it and the architecture is always evolving. From being present in the weekly triage meetings (shoutouts to the sheriff's who have been doing a great job) and going through milestones/progress for all the areas currently being worked/developed on by our group of students/peers, it's really amazing how intricate the whole thing is.


Anyways, my point about all this is not only that Telescope is an awesome project that I think all CS-program related students in Seneca should look into, but that I underestimated the amount of work that was going to go into reading/understanding the code/technology (not a jab at the telescope docs, they're actually really great) before even thinking about adding onto it. 

Plans for 2.6.0

So the plan to release the next iteration of telescope is next Thursday and I'm definitely scheming for my PRs to get merged before then. So here are a few things I've been assigned to, and some plans I have for more future contributions.

SearchBar re-design #1912

Took on this today after it was left vacant. Any chance to do some work on the NextJS front end is a plus for me, especially after having some decent hands on experience with it the past couple weeks. Amasia already has some partial work done for this, so I'm gonna start the design from there and see where it goes.

JWTs!!!! #1869 #1871

In other news, Dave's cloud computing class (CCP555) last week really went in on authentication and authorization, using AWS Cognito to manage authenticating users with OAuth, and deconstructing and understanding JSON web tokens. 

Whilst Dave did an excellent job explaining it to the class in layman terms, reading more articles on it just led me down a huge rabbit hole... Cyber Security is definitely a daunting area, and Dave said it best "As soon as you make something secure, you make it complicated" But I know way more about authorization and JWTs today then I did last week, which means I'm on the right track.

So the plan is to read up on the current telescope auth microservice, and see how we can integrate the JWTs in the right areas. 

Conclusion

I haven't been putting enough work towards Telescope than I initially wanted to, but I'm changing that and am adamant about making a contribution towards the next release. I've got a few things in mind and I'm gonna work on them one by one as I ease in to the workflow and hopefully push code in time for next Thursday,

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