DPS911 Blog #4: Ports are nearly done, now comes the real fun
Tags: opensource
Published: 2021-02-07 02:33:40

And yes, these things are suppose to release on Fridays! I forgot! We'll be back on track with the next blog onwards! :D

In this blog, we released Telescope version 1.6! You can find the changelog for that [here](https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/releases/tag/1.6.0). You're probably wondering why it's so small compared to the last one, and that's because we used a new deployment pipeline that automatically creates the new tag and releases the new version, but it ended up only picking up a few of the commits that were pushed. I believe that issue was resolved a couple of hours afterwards, but it's an exciting feature to use nontheless. Perhaps, I'll get a chance to look at it.

Speaking of 1.6, I haven't had many PRs pushed over, mainly because I only had one port assigned to do, which was the one I did last week, ExistingFeedList. I ended up with a week that mainly revolved around me reviewing PRs and leaving some feedback. A noteworthy one was the [SearchResults](https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1625) because I needed to help out Royce if he needed it. It mostly came down to just needing a rebase. There was a bug here that we decided to move to another separate issue that actually got it's own PR made as well. This revolved around the filter option that we use to filter between searching posts based on an author or post. The other noteworthy component I looked at was the Header component and by extension, [the MobileHeader and the DesktopHeader](https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1659). This was actually reviewed yesterday in a call on Teams that started during my BTP600 Design Patterns class so I had to check it out after my class was done. 

Honestly, I don't really have much else to add outside of that. I ended up lurking in several calls that [Anton](https://birtony.medium.com/) held to talk about the CD upgrade he was working on just cause I like to learn about stuff that I haven't really worked on before. This new telescope team doesn't have many developers that are good at or are interested in CI/CD related issues or even dev ops stuff in general. I believe last year's group had help from an outsider named [Ray Gervis](https://raygervais.dev/articles/) which makes me excited for one reason...

With most of the ports coming to an end, we can finally turn our attention to adding new enhancement features, and one new thing is exploring using microservices in the [back-end](https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/issues/1627). Getting something like this running would eventually allow us to really personalize the front-end by making features like a profile page for every user, and even seeing their latest activities on their profile page. Now, I have very little experience with this topic. I never even made a DockerFile before. I will without a doubt, make mistakes along the way, especially big ones. I still want to try this out. I believe that a developer is at his/her best when they're not restricted by what area they are. Specialization is not something I like. Having the freedom to choose what area you want to work on is something I enjoy alot more, which is essentially a Full-Stack developer. I guess it helps that full-stack jobs and dev ops jobs are what I applied to recently, making it even more of an importance to try this out. I do think though, that learning this stuff would be of great benefit to me, even if I don't end up working on this type of stuff ever in the future because I can always add it to my list of experience, and who knows? Perhaps, more opportunities are open for me because of that.

So I signed up to work on the microservices on Friday. I'm still contemplating if I made the right choice, but I'll know for sure by Tuesday's meeting if this is the path I'm going to take. It makes sense anyway, since design is my weakest point in web development. With this in mind, I do have some issues that I need to work on for 1.7. The biggest one being adding some new documentation for Next, MUI theming, and Typescript for the next set of Telescope developers. I haven't been reading the docs lately, and that's going to change starting this week. It's funny, my first contribution to Telescope was a fix to the environment-setup documentation. You can find that [here](https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1273). Docs are important, and I plan to update this as I go along. I probably won't do the MUI theme docs since I haven't touched that, but you can expect a good documentation on our design choices. I'm not sure when the PR will be up, but I plan to do so at some point this week for review.

Next time, docs and microservices galore. Me writing alot here actually makes me the perfect candidate to write documentation. Hopefully, they don't end up as bloated as my blog posts. See you guys next time!

PS: I had an issue with the ExistingFeedList component returning an Array instead of an actual component which the myFeeds component did not like. It was a quick catch by the author, Tony, since I had forgot to put in the React Fragments, which are essentially div tags that can wrap around other html tags. I believe these are better for ChildNodes and child components but I'll research this topic a bit more this upcoming week. [Here](https://tonyknvu.medium.com/finishing-up-nextjs-migration-89458418a2e3) you can find Tony's blog post mentioning this issue in much more detail. Nice catch, Tony!