This is the 2nd week since I started to work as a maintainer for Telescope, a blog aggregator mainly maintained by Seneca College students and alumni. The purpose of telescope is to let students to have experience on working on a real open source project, as well as learning about open source.
Last Thursday we released Telescope 2.5! There were some minor setbacks and issues that we had to resolve, so now we have Telescope 2.5.1, as well!
I have to say that it was an interesting how everybody worked diligently to finish the necessary work for the 2.5 milestone. For this week, I took a more relaxing approach on the project, focusing on some reviews along the way. Most of the coding happened last week, so I had to focus on any help that someone may ask me.
However, I decided to also focus on two areas that some people might not be super interested on when working on a project: dependencies and documentation.
Documentation
Oh, the dreaded documentation work! If I was listing the areas that people dread the most, documentation writing would probably be in the top.
If I had to be honest, I also do not enjoy writing documentation. It is not because I don't like writing documentation at all, it's because most of the time I need to write the documentation right when I finished writing the code. It is very difficult to write documentation without hiding some important information because you didn't think it was important while writing it.
Writing documentation is not easy, as you don't want to have to edit it all the time. We are already writing code, now we have to write documentation and maintain it on top of that?
However, one thing I enjoy doing is going through old code and understand what it does. There is this weird drive within me that wants to discover what the codebase is doing, and diving into the code after being familiar with the project is more feasible that if I had started when I knew nothing.
It is ambitious, but not impossible! I will require the help of everybody in the project to thoroughly review the documents written, and I help review other people's documentation.
To use testing terms, I hope we will achieve over 50% coverage for documentation on Telescope!
Dependencies
I mentioned dependencies, but what do I mean?
Well, I would like to help on how to visualize the dependencies of Telescope, so that we can also help our community. Telescope wouldn't exist thanks to the work poured into these projects every day, so to have a healthy open source community, the best one can do is to contribute back!
However, to contribute back, one needs to find that potential work. The first step is to find it! Thus, being able to visualize the dependencies you use and gather more information about them would help by a whole lot!
This sounds promising and also like a lot of fun! I'm excited to work on this, as I feel it would have a big impact in the project.
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