OSD700 Release 0.9

This post serves two purposes. I was told to blog and this is to test PR #931 for Telescope.

I'd like to give a big shout out to frequent collaborator and contributor @manekenpix for always helping me out. Be it reviews, collaborating on issues or help testing. He has made contributing to Telescope a lot easier than it should've been.

Here's the PR list I worked on for 0.9 and will continue to work on for 1.0

PR #937: Finish Search Feature
This is a PR in progress

The search feature we have right now works, but it isn't polished. We currently only support one search filter, authors. Searching takes a while, but there's no indication of whether the results are loading or not. I added a spinner to fix this. I have to also have to add an endpoint we have to search through Post content and return post results based on the data we get back.

PR #931: Add a Way to Receive Updates When New Posts are Available
This is a PR in progress

This is pretty close to finishing. I added a timer that will fire off a fetch request to get the number of posts in Telescope. If there is a change, a non-intrusive alert should pop up for 6 seconds letting the user know there are new posts available.

This PR also led @manekenpix and I on a 3 hour wild goose chase to track down why we weren't able to get one of the custom headers we had for Telescope. This resulted in the following PR #934, that's right, if you check the PR it took us 3 hours to add/change 4 lines. It was fun, but so so frustrating.

PR #919: Feed Type Should Support Delete, Modify (Delete + Create)
When I get frustrated with the two PRs above, I like to work on this because the backend doesn't lie. I don't have to deal with stuff rendering or not rendering on my screen or go reading up on new hooks. I pray if I ever have to do front-end development in the workplace I'll only have to use UseEffect and UseState hooks.

Anyways, this PR provides the functionality of removing a Feed and having it also remove associated posts in Redis + ElasticSearch. This PR was enjoyable because it taught me the advantages of writing lots of tests. The function works, but I just need  to finish writing a test for it and it should be ready to be reviewed by our gatekeeper @humphd.

Other PRs I worked on were refactoring the layout.js component we had previously using class components to become functional components. Refactoring this didn't take so long and at the end of it, I realized I got pretty good at using the useEffect and useState hooks of React.

As we're nearing 1.0 for Telescope and with so many things left to finish prior to shipping. I present the following as nobody in the Telescope channel has started panicking yet.