DEV Community: Thanh Van

3.0 Release - Final Milestone

Thanh Van — Fri, 22 Apr 2022 18:33:52 +0000

Today is the last day of this semester, I wonder why time flies so fast. I still remembered that I was just in the first week, but now it's the 14th one. Our final result of this semester is to ship Telescope from v2.5 to v3.0, which adds a lot of features, new technologies, etc.

My Contribution in 3.0

Because of the workload in the last few weeks, I was trying to balance the time I spent for Telescope, as well as other courses. In v3.0, both Francesco and I tried to finish up the sign up flow, which basically allows a user to include their Twitch or YouTube channel when signing up. A lot of decisions were made, at first, we decided to add another <TextInput> field in the same page, where user provides their Blog Url, then when we had the live session with Dave, we decided to put all the links inside the same field and separated by a space. On the other hand, when I talked to Francesco, he wanted to have a different page, where a user could provide their YouTube and Twitch channel, and it is an optional page.

The problem we were having was that we did not know how to make the page be optional with formik. By the end of the day, I realize that it is not about how we configure it in formik, it is about how we get the data (YouTube/Twitch url(s)) on that page, and because those datas are optional, so we don't really require it from a user. The code below is where I know that how to make the data is optional:

Yup.object().shape({
    [channelUrl.name]: Yup.string(),
    [feeds.name]: Yup.array().of(Yup.string()),
    [allFeeds.name]: Yup.array().of(Yup.string()),
    [channelOwnership.name]: Yup.boolean().test(
      'agreed',
      channelOwnership.invalidErrorMsg,
      (val) => !!val
    ),
  }),

We finally have the PR to finish up the sign up flow for Telescope. And I also re-enable Sign Up button in this PR.

OSD700 Recap

From the concepts I learned in OSD600, I am currently applying it in OSD700 such as how to work in an open source project, how to maintain them, and especially this course, I learned how to be a sheriff. I already had a blog post of what OSD600 is about, and what should we expect when working with an open source project, see it here.

I would say that the version of me after taking this course compared to when I was in OSD600 is totally different. I am more active now, I don't be hesitate to talk to people (thanks to Sheriff's works), create relationships, and especially I was having the new issues when using git, and I had so many new knowledges after all. Another thing I would say that is the organizational skills are also improved, which means I usually have a list in order when I am doing something. For example, when leading the meeting, I would prepare a day before the meeting to know what should I speak, as well as when doing the PRs, I have to list everything I need to do and also take notes of what my colleagues suggest me.

Finally, I have a big thanks to Dave - a wonderful prof always supports his students when they need, as well as telling them what lessons they should learn after solving some tricky issues. If you have your programming student life in Seneca, Dave is one of the profs that you should not miss when selecting your courses.

3.0 Planning

Thanh Van — Thu, 21 Apr 2022 22:08:32 +0000

The semester is going to an end, and we have to get our works done in the final release. This is the quick updates of what I have done so far.

Allows User to Include YouTube URL in Sign Up

We already added support for YouTube feed discovery, and now we are trying to update the UI to allow a user to include their YouTube channel along with their blogs. There are also the same issue with me, which allows a user to add their Twitch channel when signing up.

At first I thought this issue should not take a lot of time because we already had the support for YouTube feed discovery. The only thing I have to do is update the UI so the user can provide their YouTube channel link. Moreover, YouTube already provides the RSS feeds for YouTube channel by https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=[channelID]. However, Dave made a bunch of changes in PR #3488 to allow feed-discovery handle multiple feed URLs, and also different type of feeds, this is the most important one in terms of allowing users to include their YouTube and/or Twitch channel when signing up.

Both YouTube and Twitch features have to be done in the final release, so the next student generation can register their Telescope account on Telescope website.

2nd Time Becoming a Sheriff

This week I had another chance to become a sheriff with Jerry, it was wonderful because I would know the works of sheriffs on the week of release, and the week of planning. Some PRs I reviewed along with the YouTube issue I had:

Loading post for mobile version
Adding SUPABASE_URL to staging/production environments in PR #3438
Another detective work from Kevan, he got rid of legacy backend containers kept getting restarting due to missing package.json
Migrate https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/wiki/Database-Maintenance to docs
Telescope Supabase/Prisma docs

3.0-alpha Release

Thanh Van — Thu, 21 Apr 2022 21:33:28 +0000

I would say this week was great to me, and also it was the most terrible week I ever had in this semester. This was the first time becoming a Sheriff, and also I had to redo the entire project I had for another course.

1st Time Becoming a Sheriff

In Telescope team, everyone should become a Sheriff alternatively, at least they should be once, or twice, and there would be 2 sheriffs each week. This is a good experience for those who wants to know what their future jobs would be, and what they should expect it the meetings.

At first, I was scared a bit of becoming a sheriff, because I had never done this before. I talked to Diana a week before we became sheriffs. She was worrying about this too, but I tried not to worry and have to come over the fear and encouraged her. Personally, I didn't mind talking for the whole meeting, we planned to lead the meeting by one person, but Diana changed her mind to separate into half and half, which meant one of us will lead half of the meeting, and the other one would continue to lead it. I was not clear at first about what she wanted, but I followed her idea since this was not a big deal.

Another reason why I was not afraid of leading a meeting because every team members would have their first time becoming a sheriff, so I thought they would know the feeling of this. I did not put too much emphasis on being a sheriff because it was just a meeting between the team members by the end of the day. Simple thoughts made me not worry about anythings, and I found it was effective sometime.

Sheriff Duties

This week I was encouraging members to continue working on their jobs, and actively asked for help if they needed. We already prioritized which one was more important to get done in 3.0-alpha, so there were no new issues assigned to our contributors, they just needed to focus on what they were having. Some PRs I reviewed:

As we added Supabase, and we would keep data in it, so we would need to have a script to run the backup. PR #3405
Some minor changes in Docusaurus, and update the colors in PR #3406
Adding tests for /github/:project in PR #3412
Managing database model and migration with Prisma in PR #3418. Duke always tried to put the new stuffs into Telescope, I really admired him!!!
Allows users to press the Enter key when using the search bar in PR #3432

3.0-alpha Release

We decided to do the release on Friday instead of Thursday, which allowed others to have some times to do their works. Right now the 3.0-alpha version of Telescope is released, check it out at https://telescope.cdot.systems/

Diana wanted to do the release because she told me she had never tried it before. Luckily, she was the only one that did the release without any obstacles. It was very funny that she was nervous during the meeting and she always asked before she clicked or entering somethings 😅.

Conclusion

Beside OSD700, this was not the first time I led the meeting, so this was another chance for me to practice leadership skills. I always remember this one in mind: "If we cannot do it alone, we will do it together".

3.0-alpha Planning

Thanh Van — Thu, 21 Apr 2022 20:42:15 +0000

The Plan for 3.0-alpha

The semester is almost coming to the end, everybody is spending time on preparing for their exams, so we were planning to prioritize which features/issues needed to get done in 3.0-alpha and also 3.0 release. This week, we decided to focus on the features that we need for the final release, and removed anythings that was not important out of the milestones.

My Contribution

I did not do a lot of works in terms of putting the new codes in Telescope, however, I tried to spend some times reviewing others' PRs. Even though it was "PR reviewing", but I thought it would take almost the same time as I was putting the new codes. Some of the PRs that I reviewed in this week:

Fix Docusaurus broken links
Get rid of Satellite information from Dashboard
Run a Satellite instance to provide healthcheck route
Add GIT_COMMIT override for local environments
Beside getting rid of Satellite old links in Dashboard, Joel also added new links to the sidebar such as Portainer and Supabase production & staging

Final Thoughts

When I reviewing the PRs, I would say that some of them would not take a lot of time to review and test it. However, there were also PRs that I spent hours seeing what happened with it as well as how to tested it out. Some time I had some failures because I didn't run pnpm install when pulling the new changes from upstream, I realized how clumsy I was even though I do it almost everyday :D

Telescope v2.9.0

Thanh Van — Sat, 26 Mar 2022 03:31:08 +0000

This week is the time for releasing Telescope v2.9.0 with many new features coming up. I personally have not added any new codes for this release, but I learn the new codes from teammates by reviewing the PRs.

What I have done?

While reviewing the PRs, I honestly always run to a wall because I might not know what the PR is about, and there are also some new codes that I have never seen before. I usually head to the related issues or PRs that are mentioned, then trying to know the background of the code. Even though it takes some times, but it works for myself during the review time. I was suggested to ask the assignee about the codes, or testing it and reporting what I have done.

Francesco has moved the front-end from src/web to src/web/app and I was struggling when pulling the new codes from Master branch. I don't know why I have 47 uncommitted changes in src/web when I get the new codes from Master. I thought it was because I did not pnpm install when I get the new codes, however, it still didn't work and 47 changes were still there. I was told to remove the src/web then restoring it again, everything was fine after all.

I also reviewed some PRs about configuring ESLint for the project. And I could see that supertest was the most confused part for the PRs that I reviewed. Because some of the projects used the supertest for their tests, but some of them were not. So when reviewing ESLint PRs, I have to go back to the *.test.js file to see if supertest is used.

When reviewing PR #3309, at first I think localhost and localhost:80 are different, however, when I test it locally, I try to access to both of them, and it return the same answer -> both are the same. When running Docusaurus by pnpm start, it will run the development side of the Docusaurus. But in this PR, I just know that we are generating the static site for this, and then putting it under nginx to serve our static content.

Final thoughts

Each has its own perks. I am learning the codes by reviewing it if am not writing the new one. Review is still important as writing code because we can see our own mistakes when writing the code, and see how others will do when approaching to the same problem that we might have mistakes. I realize that my coding skills are still not good enough in my opinion, because I don't have any optimal ways when coding. And review others' PRs is one of the solutions that I will be looking for my answer.

Goal for Telescope

Thanh Van — Thu, 17 Mar 2022 04:11:11 +0000

Because of the limit of time, we need to focus on what will be shipped in Telescope 3.0 and how to get things done.

Which part of Telescope 3.0 do I own?

I was working with monorepo tooling such as eslint, pnpm and turborepo. However, the new features still have some errors need fixing.
Recently, I am working on Docusaurus, which necessarily needs to get shipped in Telescope 3.0 for the next set of students having all the documents they need for Telescope.

Which existing Issues are part of this?

The above are all the issues related to Docusaurus up to date. On the other hand, there are also some area still need being documented such as REST API, Supabase, Authentication for Telescope 3.0.

At the moment I am working on the documents, I have to carefully pay attentions for each file since the files were already created a while ago. Because of that, new issue needs to be filed to keep track everything I am doing.

Who can support me for testing, reviewing, etc.?

We are working as a team, so everyone in the team will be responsible for helping others out. Our team is combined from different people with different technical aspects, so it's hard to specifically know who is good in what area.

Coming back after break week

Thanh Van — Sat, 12 Mar 2022 04:44:21 +0000

It's been a busy week for me since I still had some mid-term tests to do along with the new release of Telescope v2.8.0

Reviewing PRs

Once again, reviewing or just going through the PRs to see what is going on never goes wrong. Every single time, a piece of new stuffs (this is more than enough in my opinion) just keeps coming to my mind. Even I will not get all of them, but still knowing how things work is absolute amazing.

My email notification was almost blown up for a week because of this PR. Abdul always goes back and forth with fixing the PR and pushing the commits, but every times I take a look at this, there was only small changes every single time, mostly from the FrameHostnames. I really admire his patience because he is not currently a student in our course, but he still spends his time working on it.

Another feature was added to Docusaurus. i18n allows us to translate a document to different languages. We decided to translate the About page to 7 languages, see issue #2962. Luckily, the Vietnamese version of the About page is up for v2.8.0 release with a lot of modifications. The reason is because some words do not make any sense when translating to another languages, and I believe it will be the same to other languages. Following up with i18n, another PR by Amasia is also up for the translation functionality for user interface.

What I have for v2.8.0

Vietnamese version for the About page, which I think it will get other students' attention when contributing to Telescope if they are from my country. They will get a better sense what Telescope is about and why would we do this.

Add some extra padding for the content inside the build log terminal in Dashboard. This is not very big, just some css style to make the content be easier to read.

Set up Mermaid for Docusaurus. This feature will allow user to make a diagram inside the .md file, which would be easier to maintain in the future instead of putting the picture to the files. Another feature I also added to Docusaurus is adding sitemap, which will create sitemaps so the search engine crawlers can crawl our docs more accurately.

Final thoughts

I can see myself is more open right now, I communicate to people a lot, I know how to do the research whenever I am not able to know a certain thing. This course makes me become mature - mature in thoughts, communication, and how I approach to a problem. I also improve my skills using git, I do not realize how efficient I communicate with git, it's just the moment when I am done the work, I don't know that I get it done, it just happens so fast and I don't realize it. The more I practice, the better I will become ^^!

Telescope v.2.8.0 progress

Thanh Van — Sat, 26 Feb 2022 03:37:56 +0000

This week is the busiest one since I started this semester, which is the mid-term week. Everybody was getting ready for their mid-term tests, and me as well. I have one on Thursday, and two on Friday.

For this week, I was reviewing the PRs in Telescope, it seems the work flow is slow this week, I guess people focus on their mid-term tests, but they still pay attention on Telescope.

PR #2939 was opened, then we had a discussion whether to keep this or not. Because user can go back to the Telescope page, where they can see the blog posts, by using the button already implemented by the browser. So, adding this feature is kind of redundant. At the end of the day, we decided to close this PR.

PR #2977 has introduced me the basic concept about Supabase. It is really hard to understand it at first, by reviewing the codes Duke has made, then reading the comments to see the ideas, I somehow got the fundamental. My email was ting-ting all the times because of this PR.

Beside PR #3041, I finish 90% of the Vietnamese translation version for the overview of Telescope. During the time I do the translation, I just realized that I have never known some definitions in Vietnamese even I am using, and seeing it around me most of the time. The hardest part for this is to have everything make sense. English to Vietnamese is a huge gap, so I proof read it multiple time even I am only transcribing one sentence.

I think this would be what I have done so far this week. Next week is the reading week, we will not have any classes. However, I would try to keep track with what is going on with Telescope. Cheer!

Telescope v2.7.0

Thanh Van — Sat, 19 Feb 2022 02:36:46 +0000

Hello everyone, it's me again. This week is the most rememberable week to me since the time I started contributing to Telescope.

The week of new release

This week, our team have to ship Telescope to v2.7.0, a lot of new things were added with 80+ PRs were closed, which was an impressive number.

We were trying to do the reviews of 20 PRs within 4 days before the new release. Originally, no one in our team thought this was possible, but yes, we successfully did it, we got as much PRs to merge as we possibly did.

Amazingly, when the new release is published, it is also the time when both Production and Staging are broken. "The main problem is because there is a mismatch between what Telescope wants for the SECRET/JWT_SECRET and what Satellite wants in 1.24.0 vs 1.25.0". Luckily, Josue saves them by the end of the day.

We finally can migrate our monorepo linting to our microservices using Turborepo, and we have publish the @senecacdot/eslint-config-telescope package to npm registry. The process doing this was up and down, but I am happy when seeing this happens.

Reviewing PRs

I personally found that this is the most exciting part when we are coming to the new release, a ton of things happen, and I can learn a lot from reviewing PRs.

This PR #2863 reminds me the time when I took Linux course in the first semester. In order to access the GITHUB_TOKEN inside the argument that it is passed, we have to use the Dollar sign ($) to get this.

Cindy has been wanted to have Docusaurus for Telescope a year ago, and now it becomes true. Docusaurus is available now, and I had a PR to use Admonition for our documents. In addition to that, Dave also gets rid of the Dinosaur icon, and use the Telescope icon instead, the PR was made for this here

Stop the dashboard UI from slutter by checking the build sha: #2953

Upcoming things

Improve UX of the Home button in dashboard to go back to Telescope
Adding sitemap to Docusaurus website
Fixing the color palette not showing properly
Adding extra padding for content inside the build log terminal. The PR for this is coming soon
Use Mermaid for Docusaurusdoc. I've never known this one before, this would be interesting to use Mermaid to generate image from text forms
Translating About Page to different languages. I would be in charge of creating a Vietnamese version of the about page.

Final thoughts

Telescope is a place for you to try new things, exploring new technologies. New contributors are welcome to Telescope, we have a whole team to help you out. The more contributors we have, the lighter works we do.

Exploring New Things

Thanh Van — Mon, 14 Feb 2022 02:43:45 +0000

Welcome to my another blog post. What a wonderful week! New concepts keep coming to my mind. This week I was playing around with Turborepo, helping review PRs, and doing some research about React Native when reviewing.

Turborepo

This week both Francesco and I were working on this PR to get ESLint config used in microservices with Turborepo. In order to avoid duplicating codes, we created a local ESLint configuration package then reuse it for all microservices. I realize that pnpm allows us to publish all packages at once by pnpm publish -r, which I have never known before, this is absolutely amazing since we don't have to do this every single time.

React Native

I am wondering what is React Native, and why do we have to use this to make a Telescope application work? Why we don't use ReactJS to do this? A bunch of questions just come to my mind when reviewing this PR, I originally thought we are making Telescope work on mobile, so it might be the reason why we are using React Native.

I also read the codes of Hung to see his changes while adding bottom navigation bar for mobile device. More interesting facts that I get for myself when reading codes and reviewing is that I can know what I have not seen before, some small errors Hung has made that I did not pay attention on before. That is also the reason why a PR needs multiple reviewers. Seems like we are exploring things, so we were suggested to use pure JavaScript instead of Typescript.

Code Reviews

I remember one of our sheriff said: "If you are not doing codes, so help others review codes, at least you are doing something and better than nothing". I don't know how about others' thought, but this inspires me a lot.

I see PR #2863 is adding Github token into all env files. Since we just added auth: process.env.GITHUB_TOKEN when adding octokitjs to Telescope, which will use GITHUB_TOKEN variable whenever it is available, so we want to populate this token automatically. But I am wondering that how can we know the value of GITHUB_TOKEN.

Even though Andew is not in OSD700 anymore, he still contributes regularly to Telescope, and I just want to show my supports for him by helping him review codes. I have seen the amount of his works: PR #2840, PR #2789. He is also the one inspires me in learning new things.

Docusaurus

Last semester, I contributed to Intro2C, which is a course notes for IPC144, and used Docusaurus to setup. So when I see Docusaurus again in Telescope, I want to take part of it. I found this issue is the only one has no assignees, so I took this one and do something with Docusaurus. After a few hours reading all the documents again, I came up with a PR, which was about using Admonitions in the documents. I can't wait to see Docusaurus in v2.7.0, this is much easier to find the documents in the future.

Difficulty

When I create a PR, it conflicts with the changes that already merged to master branch, and I have to solve all the conflicts in order to get mine merged. However, when I solve the conflicts on Github page, Commit merge is the only option for me to choose, I click on that and I see this message I am super nervous when seeing master is merge into my issue, but I see this issue happens one time previously, I don't remember exactly who had the same issue with me, but it was resolved successfully at the end.

The only thing I can do to resolve this is to reset my current PR, then rebase, and push it again. I will leave what I did to resolve this here, in case when I have the same issue again, I would know what to do

git checkout -B <my-issue-name> <the `sha` of commit>
git checkout master
git pull origin master
git checkout <my-issue-name>
git rebase master
git push origin <my-issue-name>-f

I had the same problem when trying to reset my PR in last semester, I try the way that David showed me, but I used the wrong sha, so I could not reset it at that moment.

I am happy when I get this result by the end.

Quick update for Telescope v2.6.0

Thanh Van — Sat, 05 Feb 2022 02:52:30 +0000

This week is extremely busy for me with Telescope and other courses. We are planning to ship Telescope to v2.7.0 in the next two weeks. Hopefully this time our team will make a big ship for this release. I can't wait for it!!

What happened this week

I always keep tracking Telescope issues file this week to see what is going on with it. And one thing that happened during this week is master branch is broken because of mdx packages. Details of this issue can be found here. Mdxjs was breaking e2e in development, and that is the reason why we were not able to build in scr/api. Amasia had a hard time to figure out how to fix this issue, we decided to make a team call, so everyone can contribute to this, which helped solve the problem faster. We were playing around with only pnpm i and npm build to fix this, after all, green marks were coming back with us again on master, e2e test was successful and we give a lot of "clap" for Amasia.

Turborepo

"What is this one?" is the first question I ask myself when I see the word "Turborepo".

Turborepo is a blazing fast build system for JavaScript/TypeScript monorepos: codebases containing multiple projects, often using multiple frameworks, in a single unified code repository.

If you are wondering what it is exactly, and how it works, the document about Turborepo can be found here

It sounds very cool, I have never seen or known this one before, so I take on this issue to get more understands about it. And I also make a draft PR to get more people involved.

Plans for v2.7.0

Issue 2591
Issue 2799
Issue 2777

Both #2591 and #2799 are similar to one another, so I would like to focus on dashboard in Telescope for the next release. Those two issues are using octokit.js, again, when doing issues in Telescope, I tend to feel normal when doing the parts that I totally don't know what is it about. It is fun that I can work on it and learn about it at the same time.

Final thought

Sheriffs are getting better every weeks, taking care of team members really well, and they don't miss anybody in the team. I really enjoy the way of how we learn right now, it's more like a co-op term than taking a real course in my opinion (better if I don't have another courses so I am not distracted ^^). I want to see how far I can go after this OSD700!

Update for Telescope 2.6

Thanh Van — Sat, 05 Feb 2022 02:01:22 +0000

Telescope v2.6.0 was originally planned with a bunch of issues, approximately 60 issues if I remember correctly. Surprisingly, our teammates were able to make it for this release in the limit time of two weeks. I cannot believe this is something we could do for Telescope.

What I have learned during the release

I have explored new concept that I have never known before, which is Github webhooks. The Github webhooks allow you to build or install a Github apps that can track any changes to your repository that you want to set up the webhook.

Events

When configuring a webhook, we can choose which events to catch to return the corresponding payloads. With repository change events tracking we can plan for very useful handling of requests sent to the server. We can change the list of event tracking VIA the API or UI anytime. By default, webhooks only track push events of the events.

Payloads

Payloads are understood as data package returned when there is a change of the tracked event. Each event type has a payload format corresponding to the information of that event.

This part is where I was struggling, I cannot get the correct sha for the Github payload during the release events. However, it is correct during the push events, but when we move to v2.5.0 release, it broke on both.

Final thoughts

I feel like I did not make a lot of changes during this release, I mostly spend time to read the document about webhooks and try to understand it. I will try to push myself forward when doing the release in future.