An uneventful week as a Project Maintainer (...before a crazy one)

Let's begin this technical blogpost with a quick review of my (meager) contributions this week to Telescope:

Reviews: 4
Comments: 3
Commits: 5
Issues Filed: 1
Merged PRs: 3
...Re-Reapproved PRs: ...1

These stats are not 100% accurate, just the stuff I haven't missed

​ Kind of a quiet week for me. A lot of my school work was neglected last week since we were had a deadline to hit and I wanted to push as much crap in before the deadline hit. Same story next week, as Telescope version 1.6 is due next Friday evening. Let's break down the week and highlight some interesting things that happened:

​ As usual our Tuesday's begin with a meeting. It was filled with the usual good energy, we had a few laughs, and as usual I am always excited to meet with the team. I started with a technical contribution: Porting the BannerDynamicItems component from our Gatsby frontend to our Next frontend port. I'm just waiting on the <DynamicImage/> component to get ported before I can test my component fully. I also learned that in Next you can't style a <Link /> component:

<Link className={c1asses.footer} href="/myfeeds" >
Add yours!
</Link>

vs.

<Link href="/myfeeds">
    <a className={classes.addYours}>Add yours!</a>
</Link>

Essentially, the child inside of the <Link/> must enforce the styling.

​ Wednesday came around. I find I'm missing some things during a code review process. I think this, like anything else in SE, is a skill that you can learn over time. Just navigating around GitHub is something I'm getting better at, however, I still didn't notice the ESLint disable line (or maybe that's just my eyesight) that another reviewer had noticed. Granted this PR was a big fix and needed to go in, still though. I still think my flow on GitHub has improved dramatically since a week or two ago.

I also helped test out the project in Node 15: We got a really neat PR that adds Node 15 support from Mo, another (awesome) contributor/maintainer (who like me, shares a love of public transit). It also gave me a chance to finally set up NVM (... for Windows) which surprisingly just worked off the bat.

l learned about React.memo (i.e. memoization) when reviewing another PR, something I've never even heard or thought about: essentially it ensures that a component is only re-rendered if the result won't be the same as the first render (basically, if the function arguments are the same, the result will be the same as well, thus don't re-render.) I look forward to trying it out someday.

​ Friday, Friday, Friday. I gave some advice here to a fellow maintainer's commit issues. I approved The Legend Tony's SEO PR and kept an eye on it as SEO is something I'm weirdly interested in and have NO knowledge on the subject at all. Between Anton and Humphd giving me a basic overview during our meetings and this PR, I learned a lot about how SEO actually works. I also watched a Tech Talk from DigitalOcean about NextJS and how exactly it allows for more competent SEO (tl;dr: search engine web crawlers will get served the entire page vs. nothing loading on the client side w/ just vanilla Create React App.)

I submitted a draft PR (also something I haven't done before) of the <Search> component, I'm just waiting on a dependency to fully finish and test this PR.

My about page component is finally done and merged (big thanks to Cindy/Roy/Dave for helping me fix it). Now I just have to think about how I want to style it, and where I want to go from here. This is a pretty interesting PR because of its potential for future doc additions. I haven't given much thought on how I want to iterate on this yet, but I know that NextJS has batteries included dynamic routing (which is really neat) so maybe I'll do something with this and simply render all files in the docs folder

Speaking of docs, I approved a rather old PR which helpfully added a file on debugging! Something that I always tell myself I'll learn more about but simply never do.

And I'm ending my day by reviewing Royce's SearchResults component, though there isn't much to report on this as we're still talking about this on Slack. It's a work in progress.

And in other news,

I've been spending some time this week reviewing fundamentals and found out that one of my favourite programming Youtubers released two very relevant videos: a React Crash Course and a NextJS Crash Course (Thanks again to Royce for letting me know.) Good stuff, always enjoy watching his Web Development Roadmap videos.

I finally got a theme set up on my site, so that's cool. Slowly working on this overtime this semester.

Oh, and I got a new funny avatar for GitHub that my friend Elisa made for me:

Lastly I want to wish a speedy recovery to my Unix Scripting professor Les Czegel, who was recently replaced by another professor due to health concerns. I hope he's already, I only had for 2ish weeks but he seemed to be really sweet and caring.