OSD700 Release 0.5

As part of 0.5 I was working working mainly on two issues and got a chance to help someone start contributing to Telescope.

Async/Await

I've blogged a bit about using async/await to replace our Promise code in Telescope. I started the working during the winter break and was finally able to get that merged this week. The issue actually took a while as it spanned across ~15 files in Telescope and had me refactor functions and tests at the same time, which admittedly was pretty scary. I can say I know how to use async/await a bit better, but there's still a long road ahead!

Kubernetes(minikube)

My other issue I've been working on is a collaboration between me and another classmate @manekenpix to deploy Kubernetes(minikube) on a site for Telescope at http:://dev.telescope.cdot.systems/planet. We've had success being able to deploy services and even got the ingress to work on our own machines locally. However after 5 hours of sitting down and lots of expletives yelled at the computer, we had an issue when trying to deploy it on the machine CDOT has prepared to host Telescope. We forgot minikube runs using a vm on the computer, exposing the service and deployment only really exposes it to the computer the vm is running on. After a bit of researching and asking around on the slack channel we have decided to try a Bridged connection to expose the vm to outside traffic. We're crossing our fingers to have this for 0.6 (hopefully).

Helping a new contributor

Lastly, our professor Dave Humphrey has been actively recruiting students from his other classes to participate on Telescope (where was this teacher when I started learning web development). Which I think is an amazing idea as they gain experience in filing/fixing issues, receiving feedback and just collaborating with other programmers on an open source project. One student took on a great starter issue to standardize the error code on the project. I was kind of a mentor in helping the contributor get their code merged. This gave me flashbacks to OSD600 where our professor pretty much spent the whole semester teaching git and helping students with their git problems. Long story short, the student was able to get their PR merged and is happily taking on another issue. Git is hard and it is even more so when things land daily if not every few hours, the student admitted he used git before, but wasn't used to the pace at which Telescope moved.

The mentoring also taught me something, our professor has started to emphasize the importance of submitting a PR with some work completed instead of a full fledged PR. This way if their current work is starting to go sideways the community can direct the contributor to the correct path, preventing them from going further down the wrong path. For example, the contributor I was helping out kept trying to rebase, apply their changes then commit to their PR all in one go and this kept failing. Instead, I asked the contributor to:

1. rebase their PR and drop any of the unrelated commits, push code to their PR. At this point we'd review and see what other changes we need to make, such as do we have to use any files from master to the working branch because a file on the working branch is too far gone?
2. if the current status of the PR looked good, we'd apply their changes to fix the issue and review to see what other changes we need to make

This approach worked a lot better and the contributor got their PR merged today!

In hindsight, I think I've become a better programmer. 4/5 months ago I was attempting to enhance another person's simple note taking app on github.