Welcome to Telescope 2.0
Telescope 2.0 release.
What Telescope 2.0 mean?
This means that we have taken a project and improved it until a point that wasn’t a question of when or what, but the project needed a new major version because the minor ones weren’t enough to reflect the project and our work.
All the journey until we reach this point was intense and challenging.
The team
Lead by David Humphrey, the team working on Telescope 2.0 was a mix of former students, current students from Seneca, and one developer from the open-source community.
In the beginning, as expected from a recently formed team, we had to figure out as we work on the tasks the best way of working together. I believe this could’ve been a little stressful for some of us because some of us were still trying to find where to work and how to do it. And I believe at that point; this could create a feeling of being floating in the space.
The work
Our first task was to port the old Telescope from Gatsby.js (Javascript) to Next.js (Typescript), and the second one was to create Microservices to Telescope.
I decided to re-design the Telescope front-end and create a new logo for us. The old design wasn’t good enough to fit all the potential features that will probably land in Telescope's future. I already had worked on the Telescope front-end, so I knew the code and the design very well — and where to improve it. I might not be the perfect fit for designing Telescope since I’m not a designer, but I did my best.
One of the good parts of the designing process was receiving good feedback from the current team about the design and where to improve it.
So after David Humphrey approved my idea, the team had two tasks: Microservices and Front-end.
Some of us worked on both tasks. I only worked on the front-end.
UI and UX
To design the front-end, I had to study a little bit of UI/UX in the go, which caused some changes in the first sketches, but assuming that we were all living through a process where we need to deliver tasks while we were thinking about what we were doing, I would say that it was expected.
By learning a little bit of UI and UX, I could improve Telescope and understand how important a good UI is for a project. Because if you can deliver a good UX, the users will want to stay on your website, and the developers will feel more confident to work on the front-end code.
Schedule
It was a big challenge delivering a new version every 15 days that should look good and work. That’s is where I think we touch the question where we need to look to Telescope as a product. Even if the users don’t use the entire product, they need to see the entire product to use it. So I’ve learned a lot regarding this matter.
Conclusion
First, I need to thanks David Humphrey for making all of this possible, for teaching us the way you do and for being on our side even when we make mistakes. Thank you so much.
The Telescope project is way more mature now, and so we are too.
It’s not about how many lines you wrote or how many commits you have done. Everyone here has a different life and a different work and study load. What matters is simple: did you tried your best? If you gave 100% that you could give to the project, I really need to thank you.
We made it as a team, and I wish we could celebrate it live, in person.
We have been learning, improving our skills while working on it, and we didn’t stop even now that we already made the release. We need a break to catch our breath and then start again.
I wish you all the best.
See you soon.
Pedro
