Going Down with the Ship
Tags: opensource, github, javascript
Published: 2021-01-23 02:06:15

aka: Down with the Shipness, Everybody is working for the Shipend, and Stairway to Shipven. It's a joke about shipping software.

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​	This week the members of Telescope and I worked towards shipping our [version 1.5 milestone](https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/milestone/1?closed=1), during which time I made a total of **26** contributions! Every week is a busy one for me, but this one was particularly chaotic: in an extremely positive "*I'm thankful to be here but jesus god why does this thing go all the way to 11*", kind of way. It was great! And I can't wait for next week. Every two weeks we ship a new version of Telescope, and since this week was shipping week we all had to rush to get our code in, reviewed, and successfully merged before tonight at midnight. Bi-weekly chaos doesn't seem so bad to me.

​	One thing I found during the last two weeks is that if I don't keep up to date with the project I'll sink like a stone VERY quickly. Thus I'm trying to make it my goal to keep my notification count on GitHub as low as possible, preferably 0 before the end of the day (similar to the idea of [Inbox Zero](https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/inbox-zero).) In order to do this, I'm spending a few hours each day in the morning just reviewing (*submitting actual code reviews or just looking over code*) all notifications towards the project, as well as any conversations I might have missed in Slack. I also communicate excessively with multiple people on our slack channel in my attempt to keep up to date, or just to provide help. You ever tried to change a car tire while the car is moving? Not exactly the easiest task at hand, though it is a lot of fun. Until your car arrives at its destination. A flaming destination. Putting out that fire out won't be as fun.

​	Out of the 26 contributions this week here is a breakdown of my stats (*purely for cathartic reasons, mind you*): 

> **Reviews**: 16
> **Comments**: 6
> **Commits**: 5
> **Issues Filed**: 1
> **Merged PRs**: 2
> **Reverted PRs**: ...1
>
> *These stats are not 100% accurate, just the stuff I haven't missed*

​	I'm really enjoying reviewing PRs and making/reading comments. Interacting with other developers who don't completely eclipse my skill level (*i.e. a skill level that I can understand*) is as rewarding as it is educational.

​	As part of my technical contributions towards Telescope I finished up implementing a [Logo component](https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1513), an [about page](https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1487) for the project, and an [input component to searching for blog post authors](https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1577). Out of these three small PRs, my about page was the most creative and interesting for me. I found a library online called MDX that converts markdown pages into... well, *better* markdown pages, or at least more interesting. The library allows you use JSX code directly in a markdown document and renders that code out at build time.

​	Unfortunately the project wasn't particularly happy with my about page and decided to freak out, [so we had to revert the change](https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/commit/0a23cf5774f6c970125f46ebbec0c5b475ba1c06), so this is something I have to investigate over the next couple days. However it also gave me an opportunity to pitch a half-baked idea about utilizing the MDX library: *What if we render all the project docs and not just the about page?* So that's likely what I'll be working on, hopefully more to talk about soon*ish*.

​	Overall this week was pretty big for me, I learned some neat things about JavaScript (the ***spread operator***, *which is amazing when used in conjunction with higher order functions*) and Next.JS (basic context knowledge) that I didn't know of before. But mostly I learned a lot about "managing" a large project with several active developers all contributing at once, and the communication and organization required as a result. Open Source is amazing and I hope I can keep it going even after finishing this course.


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I found that writing this post was challenging, mostly because of how much went on this week. I have to do a better job at keeping track of that next week so I actually have something of substance to talk about.

In other news I finally got [my website deployed](https://chrispinkney.com/) in https with my domain from Namecheap. I'm using DigitalOcean's new App platform, it's great. Hoping to work on it some more as it's just a basic Hugo-based blog frontend and personal project showcase. I had a website that I built and hosted on a DigitalOcean linux server, but this is the first time I've used several pieces of software together, yet separate from one another (https, hugo, domain from namecheap, and app).