Telescope

#opensource

A single project

Oh man, do I love the idea of not having to search for some new application to work on. Going through tons of poorly documented, too easy or too difficult issues was not a great time. Besides, it was really tough to have no direction or suggestions from others. Sometimes there was, but in cruicial times I didn't find any. Now, for the next couple months my focus will be on a single project - Telescope.

Not only it's a single project, but I am now in a community. Now that is a place where I belong - creating discussions, asking things and answering questions, perhaps befriending new people.. Aww yeah. I am actually excited for it.

The project is being worked on by people of my level. Other students who may or may not be better coders, but at least not by a huge gap. Working on other projects always felt intimidating and made asking for help harder.

I am actually excited to contribute to this. Having enough time to see around the project, play with some things and see its different ares is a less stressful environment this time.

What interests me

There are three things I want to note.

Firstly, in our first triage meeting I had a new idea right away. That idea isn't that simple either. It would need a team to develop and is a new.. "thing". Not just an extra function.
More on that later.
Secondly, technology-wise I know I am always down for Go. Buuuut... it's not really around in this project. I was suggested to look at Docker instead. I still have no clue what it actually is. Well, I kinda do - it's a container that allows you to run things in different environments. And it has a whale as a logo. I haven't made any code for it though.
Another thing I could always do is front end - I am not new to design and it seems that people are not as excited about it, so I might need to fill the role.
There was also something that I could see myself learning - cloud hosting. I did research it at some point for a project and I saw how it works.. Somewhat. I don't remember much. But I do remember it being not as scary.
Finally, I want to do the boring quality of life thing that nobody wants to do - documentation. Anything that just improves readability, makes the whole searching for a task process faster - I want to make better. I like putting things in order. I like having them lined up. I don't mind it being boring. As opposed to being completely alone and lost developing a new feature - I find it comforting. But yea, sure, it's also boring. (unless it has color to it, like let's say assigning labels to things - that's already more fun just because labels have color. Interesting how that works.)

The new function

I literally have an issue all ready to be posted right now. I have formatting, screenshots and all that cool stuff there. However, I am scared to. As usual. What if I missed something? What if there's an obvious mistake I overlooked? What if all that effort is really in vain? See, it wouldn't bother me as much to put in the effort but never show anyone I have put the effort and have it never see the light of day. As opposed to posting it and having people say "well, that's awkward, but you just wasted a whole day on something we don't need".

Aaaaaanyways. Having it all ready in that issue, I don't want to write the same thing twice. So I will make a quick summary of it and link you to the actual issue once I post it.

The idea is to have a visual representation of the Telescope project. It would show how much of the project is in different areas like front end, back end, documentation etc... It would connect concrete issues, people, PRs, and labes to that visualisation so you can navigate there right away. It should be a good page to look at whenever you are looking for a task to do, or wondering what is the state of the project.

A cool thing is that it would get all data from GitHub, we will just be showing the same things in a better way.

The issue with all the details!

The community

I am very excited to actually talk and collab with people. We now have a "front end team" which I belong in! (Well, I made that name up, but maybe it will become a thing. Just continue repeating it till people believe it's a thing.) I will immidiately need someone's help in remembering how to rebase a branch. So that's fun, asking for help, yaay... After that point though it should become easier to communicate. The issue I was assigned to seems easy.

I am somewhat worried about the time when I will be assigned to be a sheriff. Having no sleep schedule might not work that well with answering people's questions right away. Perhaps I could work night shifts?

I'm sure my enthusiasm will slow down once I get stuck with an actual problem. That always happens. Until then - LET'S GOOO