Road to 2.6.0

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 manageable level and set a minimum goal to either fix the issue or make progress towards it. 

Although it's a small fix, I hope it's just a sign of what's to come. I do still have the itch to make a bigger contribution.

SearchBar UI Redesign #1912

If you can't tell by the ticket no. this is an old one. An already once revived issue, I'm now being passed the torch to finish it. Plus it's front end UI work so this should be fun. But first I gotta spec out the details.

Researching old archived/semi finished PRs/Issues/Threads just feels like detective work. You're trying to get more info and put together the pieces by whatever documented conversation is available on the repo, opening tabs after tabs of related discussions and threads. But as you work your way through and the pieces start coming together 

So what I've gathered from this is that there's an advanced search functionality that needs front end implementation to use, in fact this thread actually gives more detail.

Since Amasia and huyxgit (a previous contributor) has done partial work on this, it actually is quite a blessing since there's a lot of work I could use to reference and Amasia is still an active contributor so I could easily discuss more detail with her wherever I'm a little unsure at.

Outside Telescope

Discord is one of the main platforms that I communicate with my friends from back home who are all now dispersed around the world to pursue their respective studies. So discord is a real godsend for its convenience, ease of use, performance, features, I can go on and on about things that make it one of the leading voip apps today.

But one thing that makes discord so interesting is its community channels and ability to implement bots in them. Bots can do various things like slash commands, reminders, timers, administrating messages, and one of my favourite and coolest thing, you can craft a music bot to play music in the voice channels.

So I finally decided to try and make one using Discord JS

DiscordJS (GitHub)

DiscordJS is a NodeJs module that makes it easy to make a discord bot through interacting with the Discord API. It's got 240 million + downloads, so safe to say it's quite reputable. Anyways, it's open source too! They've got guidelines/docs with very specific instructions on how to contribute regarding formatting, git rebasing, etc.

CONTRIBUTION.md

Might be really useful to brush up on the topic of properly formatted contributions, since I made a mistake in squashing and merging the telescope PR... Anyways, I've got this repo starred, so I'm gonna keep an eye out as a I study the code to see if I can maybe lend a hand somewhere, sometime.