Joel's Open Source Dev Blog

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 ...

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...

It's the weekend January 15, 2022. The first of my 6th semester and it is looking like a heavy one.... Though it's fine, because who's classes better to power through no other than Dave's . When I saw that there were 2 classes being delivered by Prof. Humphrey, I stood my ground on the schedule builder and waited patiently for the first moment to claim my spot in his classes.  I got into OSD700 no problem but had to apply for waitlist for the cloud computing class. To my luck, I eventually got in and acquired my carefully curated choices of 4 classes, which are very closely related in that the knowledge, and content found in each of them apply to the rest very synergistically. (P.S. the other 2 classes are Microsoft Azure Technologies, basically another alternative to AWS, and PRJ, our capstone project course in which my group are planning on building a web app) OSD700 // WINTER2022 Boy oh boy, this course is gonna really test me to my limits, I can feel it. Let's s...

This will be my last post written for my OSD600 course, after that, every post will be about my own journey in programming. And so I wanted to say that this course, out of all the classes I've taken so far in Seneca College for my program (CPA), is by far the absolute best course I've had in the school. The topics it covers, the knowledge it teaches, and the practicality of it is just exceptional. I've learnt so much from this course, from both the professor and my own, and that's thanks to Prof. David Humphrey's mentoring. He not only taught us how to use GitHub, make pull requests, and use Git, which I should mention is one of the most well taught guides on how to use it and I recommend anyone to watch his recorded lectures on his YouTube channel , but he also taught us how to go out on our own and expand our knowledge through the beauty of Open Source Programming. With this newfound knowledge I've acquired from the class, I'm much more confident and eager...

So for the past week I've been working on and off with migrating the components for telescope I've taken from the list that needs porting.  The Components I've undertaken are BackToTopButton GitHubContributorCard DynamicImage I was hoping to work on one of the Search components since I've spent so much time previously working on them, but it looks like some of my other peers have already beat me to it. Nevertheless, I still wanted to help with the migration as much as I can. So I used this  reference our professor had posted in the Meta issue regarding migrating from Gatsby to Next JS. The first thing to do is to edit the dependencies in the package.json, since it's different than the one used for the Gatsby front-end. We will still need the Material UI modules for our front end, but all the gatsby dependencies will now be removed in place of something else. For example, the Image component used from gatsby-image will now be replaced with next/image. Where as in bu...