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Abdulbasid Guled
Abdulbasid Guled

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The importance of reviewing code properly, and managing a project repo

Btw, I seem to have lost my Hacktoberfest shirt. I'll need to find that since we need pics of these.

With the semester over, I feel like it's the perfect time to reflect on what I did outside of my courses rather than inside, because to be honest, this semester wasn't one that I enjoyed a lot. Not that my courses were difficult, but that they felt like they had no place at this point in my program.

So onto what you really want to read. With a lighter school schedule, I got an opportunity to continue working with Telescope, something not many of my peers appear to be doing. But wait Abdul, you're not doing the open source courses this time. Why bother?

Open-source is a lot like the web in that it evolves as time passes by. A great example of this was the recent switch to pnpm from npm. Installing and running scripts has been so fast. I specifically remember researching about this around February last year, however, never got to look into this further since the microservice wave came crashing down.

So as a result, I ended up slowly taking over the role of reviewing PRs and less developing actual code for Telescope. In the last 2 months, I think I only committed about 2-4 PRs in total, including this recent one adding a .dockerignore file to our search service. Reviewing code is important since any little mistake means that the entire codebase breaks down.

As a result, I tried to pick PRs that didn't do much coding or did minimal editing. Smaller PRs are always easier to review than larger ones. Of course, there were times this couldn't be avoided. The main culprit being all the status service PRs and search related PRs.

As the term goes by, I'll end up stuck at my co-op doing work with spring/camel and have to shift my focus away from Telescope. Naturally, this meant I had to focus on a few less PRs while also spending time mainly reviewing code. Ofc, there's stuff I miss whenever I review code, and Search ended up breaking again (As if me breaking it once wasn't enough). The group this time is much bigger than the 10 I was apart of so that means more progress maybe. I like the ideal of overseeing a repo's evolution and my unique status as a Telescope alumni gives me a chance to sort of help out as a senior developer. Always gotta get that resume stacked.

My goal aside from my co-op though, is to continue looking into Supabase and search related content along with JWT related issues I never got to look into. If React Native stuff gets going, I'll work on that stuff too. But the main idea is to be a sort of extra eyes since there's more students working on Telescope than ever before. Wish them luck, they'll need it.

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