Telescope 2.7 and a long overdue blog post

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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/PR it gets easier to ask the questions and pointing out code in reviews.

Being Sheriff really encouraged me to step out of my comfort zone, speaking on issues that I'm not even sure if I understand correctly and asking questions to better make sense of them. Part of the journey of being a better developer is learning more things, and admitting not knowing everything. (Dave will always just admit when he doesn't have knowledge on issues or topics and I think that's quite relieving to hear for us developers who suffer from chronic imposter syndrome 😁)

Communication

It was really great, leading a meeting really pushed me to take initiative being vocal to get the other people to talk. I really hate the awkward silences that happen mid meetings (even though sometimes people definitely need breathers) I just have a personality that get a little anxious about them so I felt like I was moving at a fast pace in the beginning, but slowly and surely adjusted to the rhythm at which people were speaking and taking part in the conversation.

Planning

And since last week only involved planning and issue backlog updates, we were relieved of having to take care of the Release this past Thursday and handed that to our fellow peers Tue and Francesco :) (who happened to break production on Thursday... 😅 Not the Sheriffs' fault! in fact props to them and Dave for amending the situation quickly 🙌) So thanks guys. They've definitely done a much better job than I would have releasing it.

Conclusion

All in all it was really great experience leading a meeting and managing a project even if it's just a little taste. Obviously still getting used to the ropes of it but it definitely gave me lots of insight on how to be a better developer as a leader or in a team.


Will speak more on the Telescope 2.7 developments in the next post!

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