Telescope 1.8
Telescope 1.8 is a significant mark for everyone active and working on the project; the microservices and the new UI are now on our production server. Which means the new Telescope is flying. And I’m so proud of every active member that contributed to the project since we started porting to NextJS.
The new UI is not 100% implemented, but it is working well.
Learning while reviewing
I was reviewing a PR from Duke when I faced a JS shorthand pattern in his code that I had never seen before. I spoke with Josue, and he already knew the shorthand and pointed me to the docs. It is incredible how JS syntax is like a river that flows. I love it.
The process of reviewing a PR and learning while doing it is good; I used what I learned with Duke in my PR for Posts, Timeline and Post.
Posts component tree.
I spent more time than I expected coding the new Posts, Timeline and Post components. I had three different versions of it — the first version wasn’t so effective because to make the tablet and mobile sizes, the code was becoming so long. The second approach had a very different start point from the first; but I didn’t go so far with it because at a certain point, with my previous experience with the components’ code, I realized the second approach future would end up in the same place as the first one(very different start points ending in the same place).
There was a structural problem on the first two approaches because for Desktop, some parts of the code needed to be inside a container and these same parts should be outside of a container for mobile devices. I tried to solve everything using CSS in the first two approaches to avoid code duplication, but it was getting highly hardcoded. Wednesday night, two days before the release, I still couldn’t break the hardcoded part into a dynamic code.
Thursday, one day before the release, I started to discuss the code and the ideas behind it with Meneguini, and our communication presented me with what I was missing. I had to accept that I would have to solve the problem using more than CSS.
So I used React powers to refactor the Post component and accomplish what we needed.
1.8 Final thoughts
What we achieved in 1.8 is a result of our communication and effort.
Tony did a good job working on our theme and font issue, delivering what was needed very fast.
Yuan Lee worked on the avatar issue, which is extremely important to our UI. She was incredibly generous with me and the project, waiting for me to finish my PR and avoiding a good amount of conflicts in a possible rebase. So we could coordinate which PR would get merged first.
Yuan Lee also worked with Anton on dependabot, and now she is investigating a solution for our post title.
Duke did an excellent work fixing and improving various issues on Telescope’s frontend:
As always, Josue did an excellent work not only for our UI. Everyone that knows him also knows that he is the kind of player who plays in all positions. Sometimes I attempt to argue with him how JS is more beautiful than TS, but until now, I didn’t make any progress on that.
Meneguini help was essential in discussing the post-component puzzle with me, even without being a Telescope member.
We still have a good amount of PRs to fire, a bunch of issues to file, and this is the evidence that we are heading in the right direction.
Thank you so much.
Pedro
