DPS911 Blog #2: Telescope 1.5 ships, my first release!
Tags: opensource
Published: 2021-01-23 04:47:25

And oh my goodness, there's so many commits we pushed in this release that it makes me wonder if my team and I have lives outside of open source. 

So, Telescope 1.5 shipped today. The first of many releases our team plans on doing for DPS911/OSD700. We shipped so many commits that I can hardly talk about all of them. After the way I ended DPS909 on a good, promising path, it felt nice to be able to contribute significantly to an open source project as big as Telescope. 

This release's focus was on porting the front-end from Gatsby to Next.js. I ended up porting over 4 components to Next. They were as follows:

* [Footer](https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1526)
* [AboutFooter](https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1563)
* [DeleteFeedDialogButton](https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1582)
* [PostSearchInput](https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1559)

I also added some types to the interface file that we're exporting in order to use them in the DeleteFeedIconButton, and the other future components that used them [here](https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/issues/1570). Overall, a decent amount of ports here, and all with success.

Unlike DPS909, where reviewing code came at the end, we're encouraged and pushed to review all code that comes into Telescope. As a result, I ended up reviewing many PRs, including ones that I wasn't assigned to. I can't remember the exact number of PRs I reviewed, but I know it's one area that I'm trying to get better with so I'll definitely need to do more in the future. I saw the master branch break twice, which shows how careful we have to really be in terms of only accepting in code that works.

Typescript, Typescript, and more Typescript. Learning about the React types used with Typescript was very tedious, especially for the function props, but very rewarding. Here's an example of what I mean:

![TypeScript Function Props](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/57n728dwudw6z03fm8ck.png)

I had to read up the docs to figure out the right event type for the event object.

As the porting gets closer to being finished, I'll inevitably have to end up working on new features completely, instead of taking code that works and porting them over. By then, I'm hoping that my skills have developed enough that I can get the ball really rolling. 

To ensure I don't end up forgetting what's been going on, I try to ensure I look through all stuff happening on both slack and github. I work on the weekends so this is significantly reduced during this time, so I try to pour out more during the week as a result.

One goal for me for the next release is to try working on something I don't necessarily have knowledge of. My colleague, Tony, was struggling this release with figuring out how the MUI theme worked and it was one of those issues where I really struggled to put into words how to best approach this issue, mainly because I don't know how. I want to try to fix this so that I can be of more help to my teammates. 

That said, I'm not at all angry with how the overall progress was. We went from around 32/33 PRs to 19. Many of them were quickly merged while others were pushed to later releases. As a matter of fact, we're nearly done with porting over the front-end. We just need to get the Search and About page rocking, and I think that's it. I'll have more to say next week when we go through our weekly triage meetings to discuss whose doing what.

Next time, a whole new task appears before me. Nothing due next week, but just progress. Cause we can only learn when we try. Until then, stay tuned!