Perseverance

​ The week started off with me leading our weekly triage meeting, with Mo taking notes. There's not too much to talk about, as only a few students were wounded in the telescope attack. I decided to spend a good chunk of meeting time focusing on older issues, as seeing 100+ issues, some of them from 2019, makes my neat-freak skin crawl. I imagine that this is a project most medium sized projects deal with. I also imagine that larger scale projects simply don't. All in all I enjoyed leading the meeting but was surprisingly nervous throughout most of it.

I also lightly reviewed one of Sir Dave's PR as I happened to be playing musical chairs recently with various PORT values for the plethora of services we're all working on.

​ On Wednesday I continued to work on the excellent abundance of requested changes to my Users microservice by Mo, Abdul, Doc Josue, and Sir Dave. My all-time favourite requested change would have to be this one. Previously I had two functions which would create different users that I could save to my database (to test routes that return all users, for example) but this change lets me instantiate as many users as I'd like with one function, and simply pass in different information when required. Awesome. I had really wanted to do something like this but couldn't figure out how to syntactically get it down.

I also started working on a fix to the pathetically un-styled About page. I'm still not crazy about working on front-end stuff, but I'd still really like to get better at it, plus, in the immortal words of Doc Josue:

but you know, it's good to know a bit of everything

Although clearly he's never tried to ask three+ designers to all agree on a design of something, as I had several changes, both on the GitHub page and privately on slack, requested of me at the same time. Lots of fun! I did learn a lot about CSS in the process, and what I already knew was a big refresher for me as I'm not the greatest in styling stuff. I do however always enjoy doing CSS stuff... for about the first 30 minutes, then I just wish I had gone into medicine instead. Big thanks to Ilya who spent some time with me teaching me a lot about various CSS properties and breakpoints, and helping me get the PR to where it is today. Hopefully it'll land soon.

​ Thors-day! I finally finished my micro-service approved and landed! Many hours of hard work finally over, with more hours to come. I also got to use the shiny force button too!

I genuinely couldn't have done it without all the guidance and help given to me by my professor and peers. The one thing I love about open source work is the communication ability coupled with suggested changes. Learning from those better than you is incalculably valuable. I'm really glad that I stuck with it and got it done, although It didn't get completed in as timely of a manner as I'd have wanted.

Oh, and naturally my power went out half way-through my final rebase, which resulted in:

PS C:\Users\Chris\Documents\Code\Repos\telescope> git status
fatal: not a git repository (or any of the parent directories): .git

Lovely. I had to reclone my fork and continue on my way. Not the end of the world but definitely annoying.

So what's next? I'm not sure! Figuring out what to do is always part of the fun. I'd like to get this wired up to prod next, then do a test-run to see if everything works as expected. Then move onto addressing several security concerns. Finally, I'd like to start working on actually implementing the users micro-service!

​ Friday. I started out by reviewing a minor Husky fix by Josue. How strange that dependabot upgrading our web hook program actually caused it to stop working. I mean that genuinely not as a snarky comment. It seemed like functionality completely broke in between versions and none of us noticed it for a few weeks. Strange. Thankfully Doc patched us up and we're good to go.

I also very quickly approved this PR (generously explained to us during on Friday meeting call) which adds an authorized middleware to Satellite which ensures that users must be authorized to execute specific routes. I look forward to implementing this, as security is something I was concerned with.

Speaking of our Friday meeting, Royce spent some time working on a fix for inline img tags in Telescope which he was kind enough to explain to us. I didn't think a simple task like this would be so involved but given how different blog providers handle images differently than another, it makes sense that Telescope can't accommodate every blog provided equally. Royce proposed working on a fix to detect Blogspot (our current problem child blog platform) and handle those images differently from the rest. I'm curious to see how this will handle random RSS feeds (i.e. those not on medium/blogpost/dev/etc.) and if it'll be a problem.

Finally I also released a minor fix to my users micro-service's Dockerfile for prod. This is what I get for copying and pasting without looking through it. However the fix also fixes my OCD as I had just noticed that a few files were not in the same structure as the rest of the micro-services. Phew. Now I can finally sleep well at night.

An overall busy but quiet week for me. I'm really glad that I was able to get the microservice merged and I'm really excited to move further forward with it.