New year, new beginnings, and a new place for blogging. I’ve decided to try blogging on dev.to this term. My posts for OSD600 are back on Medium.
In this new, hopefully last, semester, I’m continuing my journey with opensource development by taking OSD700. Thanks to the scheduling requirements, this time around I didn’t have to fight for a spot.
The Similarities
I’m expecting that there will be a lot of similarities to OSD600. There will be quite a bit of work with Git and GitHub, handfuls of blog writing, many personal limits being pushed, lots of cursing myself for taking this course, and just as many pats on my own back for deciding to take this class.
The Differences
Disregarding the obvious fact that this is a more intermediate course, even in the first week I can already feel the differences between the two classes. Changes that I’m excited about.
For starters, classes are now live. This means dragging myself up early in the mornings twice a week to attend lectures and meetings. It also means more interaction and windows of opportunity to ask questions.
The centerpiece of our focus this term is to work on Telescope, with the end goal of releasing version 3.0 by the end of the term. No longer does it feel like we have to compete against the whole world to look for issues to work on. We are now working as a team. We also get to learn how triage meetings function, and play the role of sheriff.
I’m kind of struggling to express how much safer I feel with the feeling that we’re working as a team. For people with less experience, such as myself, it was daunting to head into the projects of strangers to work on harder issues, with the fear of embarrassment that I’d ask stupid questions. Now that we’ll know one another more through meetings, I think I’d be less shy on asking questions and be more confident in trying out issues that I’m still unfamiliar with. Obviously, I’d would still try to pull my own weight, but its nice to know I have a team at my back.
Goals and Expectations
There is a lot going on at Telescope and there are many new concepts that I’ve never touched on before but would like to try out. Also, there’s quite a few skills I still need to work on and could get better at. I don’t really want to limit myself with a list, and at the same time I don’t want to get too far ahead of my own capabilities. Regardless, I will try to list, and it might be fun to come back at the end of the term to see how many I’ve reached.
React
I’d like to get more familiar with React and its expansive set of popular frameworks. Word has it that some team members had been looking to creating an app of Telescope through React Native. Since I’m taking a mobile development class as well, this might be something I can dab into.
Expanding Search and other microservices
At our first triage meeting, I jumped on an issue on adding tests for Search. Truthfully speaking, I had grabbed it because I heard the keywords “Microservice” and “how search works”. I’m looking forward to the next live lecture to get a tour of Telescope as I’d like to become more familiar with the Microservices at Telescope. We also got to see a live demo of how the current search bar isn’t yet satisfactory, so I feel it might be nice to work more on that.
Making use of GitHub API
Data mining and Big Data surely weren’t flares for no reason. I think the idea behind it is to provide future students with some insights to what students in the path have done, and prove to the former that they too can accomplish OSD milestones as well. This might be something fun to play around with.
Docker and Kubernetes
I lost the race to get in CCP555, and I seem to recall that they might touch on Docker. Regardless, containers are something I haven’t touched upon before Telescope, so this is a great chance to learn more about them.
Contributing to the “Supply Chain”
This is like a wishful goal. We’re encouraged to contribute to dependencies and projects that are being used in Telescope. I hope to be able to at least create a PR for one of them. The end goal of course to have something I can proudly show off on my resume.
Conclusion
There are many talented and experienced members on the team, and I’m sure I’ll get to learn a lot from them. I am praying that I won’t create too many bugs or break the project. Regardless of my worries, I am hyped and I can’t wait to see how far I’ll be pushed this term.
Top comments (0)