DPS911 — Here We Go, Telescope!
Wow, I finally get to start talking about Open Source again! I’m very excited just writing about this, cause I have a greater chance to work on Telescope, and my own projects. This blog post will be split into two parts: Telescope, and OpenTTC respectfully.
Beginning with Telescope. To be completely honest, at first, I was very nervous. I thought that a lot of my PRs and reviews would end up breaking a lot of what we have so far. I kinda have issues with confidence, but that all went away when we had our first meeting. My cohorts, along with Dave have been nothing but positive, and it really set in stone the thought of me doing well, and contributing.
Let’s begin. I wanted to learn more about the back-end on Telescope, so I begun to read the issues on what’s needed to be fixed. I noticed that in Issue #1576 (https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/issues/1576), we needed to properly have a FRONTEND Variable, so that we can dynamically switch between gatsby and NextJs. Well, that seems like it’s no challenge, right? Not really… Since this is my first proper foray into Telescope, I needed to understand how the code works before I even attempt to fix things.
I spent a good while reading index.js from the back-end, and decided to make a change. Once I finished it, all I had to do was test it, and make a PR. After I made my PR, Dave gave me some changes that I needed to do in order for the PR to merge.
Another Issue that was left out was Telescope not working on Node 15.x and npm7.x. Installing our peer-dependencies would completely break, and Telescope can’t run without them. Anton had researched a little bit on the issue, but I really needed to understand why it was buggy to begin with. This started my hunt for the answer, and by golly, I found it. Apparently, npm7.x has had a huge overhaul on how peer-dependencies are installed, and they’ve included a special config command, if you need to use the old way of installation. Once I found that, I needed to see if it was possible to write that in the .npmrc file. Yes! It works!…. on my machine at least…. I didn’t want to create a PR on this, until I know 100% that it works.
Thankfully, Chris (bless up for helping!) had Node 15.x installed on his machine, so he tested it and it works! Woo-Hoo!
Only thing though, I need to completely rebase my PR because of all the unmerged commits I had. No worries. Sometimes we need to clean up our environment, just like we do our houses.
Part 2 Will Be About OpenTTC, Stay Tuned!