Release 0.3: My inexperience shows, paying the ultimate price for failure
Tags: opensource
Published: 2020-11-19 05:06:58

Writing this blog post is hard for me. I've been dealing with some personal issues the last few weeks and it's been seriously making me question if I have any worth in my school or myself at all. I'm 3 years in so changing programs is not an option at this point, but it's been killing my ability to really focus on anything and that showed with this release.

We were supposed to make 2 PRs this time, but they both had to be bigger than what we did for release 0.2. Unfortunately, I failed to meet both targets for this week. The issue I was working on outside telescope was a disaster in that I had to work with something that I had no experience with. I decided to go with creating some test cases for a react open source project that I tried to do during release 0.2 but gave up on, and my inability to get it done showcases my lack of knowledge in writing test cases.

So that PR went horribly, how about the internal PR for telescope? Well, that went about as good as most of my attempts at doing front-end code, not so well.

You see, I was working on fixing the back-end and front-end. There was an issue where if elasticsearch closes abruptly, the back-end would send a response of 200, but send nothing at all, which would cause problems for the front-end, since it had no data to parse at all. I thought, "This should be simple enough". Little did I know that I would struggle with this PR so much that by the deadline, I never got my PR merged which was required for the internal PR for this release.

Long story short, I struggled really hard with getting my issue resolved. It was so bad, I had to wait for other students working on issues similar to my own to get their PRs merged so that I could rebase my PR and add my own. Communication was key, and unfortunately, my lack of self-worth and inability to effectively communicate costed me greatly. I did end up getting my issue resolved, however, I missed the deadline to get it merged as the other reviewer was unfortunately, absent when my latest commit was pushed.

I'm as disappointed with my performance this release as many of you are reading this. It makes me sad knowing that I was unable to accomplish the task I was given. Even more, I'm frustrated at myself for not doubling down on the issues I decided to work on. I have alot of thoughts going through my head as to how things could've gone better or how I could've been more assertive, but that's besides the point. Even though I struggled mightily with this release, I still felt that I learned something. Unfortunately, the reality in open source and software development in general is that deadlines must be met, or else there's consequences to face. Now, it'll be my marks, but had I been in an actual job, that would've been my job gone, just like that.

I'm sorry if my blog this release sounded very depressing in nature. It's just who I've always been. Life hasn't been very fair to me so I just try to make the best of the chances that I'm given.  Sometimes it works out well, and other times, it doesn't. This time, it didn't and to those that read this, I'm sorry for letting both you and myself down.