Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
Status report: when you’re stuck, ask for help
This week was definitely a learning experience for me. I took on responsibilities that I honestly did not think I could handle, and though I still have a lot of PRs to review and issues to solve, I believe it was a step in the right direction.
My First Technical Contribution of the Semester
Funny thinking about it now, but just two weeks ago I was really starting to doubt if this course was for me since I felt like everybody really knew what they were doing whereas I was completely lost when it came to Telescope. But after this week, and after submitting my first pull request, I am feeling a lot more confident.
As stated in my Midweek Madness blog post, I was assigned to port the SearchResults component to NextJS and update it’s styling. This was tricky since I didn’t really know NextJS or Gatsby too well — though after a lot of reading, watching, and learning later I was finally ready to try and port the component (shoutout to HyperTHD for streaming himself working on Telescope, it helped me understand what to look out for when porting). After trying and trying and trying, I managed to get the warnings and complaints to a bare minimum. However, there were still some errors that I just couldn’t resolve and I didn’t know what to do about it. This is where I think the big lesson of the week comes in — during today’s team meeting I asked regarding what to do about those errors, and it turns out they were the result of bugs… With help from the team I was able to wrap up the port and submit a PR shortly after, and it was all made possible because I reached out and helped (for those of you out there wondering if you should speak up, take note).
Two steps forward, one step back. Turns out I introduced a runtime error. Adding the SearchResults component to any page gives you this:
This confuses me since I never even touched the Timeline.tsx file. This is something that I will have to work on pronto during the weekend as it’s holding up another PR, but for now I am happy that I even was able to submit something. On an ending note, thanks to chrispinkney for finding the error above and HyperTHD for taking the time to review my PR.
