Slow and steady

This past Friday we released version 2.9 of Telescope and we are now closer and closer to the big final 3.0 release.

Breaking things down

I received feedback on my PR from the previous week about sharing a single Nginx container for all static sites. The restructuring of the directories made the PR too big with hundreds of file changes (although most just renaming). To make it easier for reviewer (and for myself!) I decided to split the work into multiple PRs. I started with moving the src/web directory to src/web/app.

I searched again through the whole project for paths that needed to be updated. This more narrow focus on a smaller task helped me find some relative paths that I missed in the original PR. This really shows the benefits of splitting a big task into smaller pieces to make it more manageable.

Before merging this PR we needed to update the path on Vercel and give a heads-up to other students working on frontend issues that they needed to rebase their branch before moving forward.

I still have to do the same with the docusaurus and test-web-content directories and then make the necessary Docker and Nginx changes.

Frontend changes

The other issue I worked on this week was adding a copy button for code snippets. I had to revisit a lot of Web APIs features so I spent a lot of time on MDN (I love this website, there's always something new to learn on it). I originally used MouseEvent to capture the mouse movement and add a copy button to the DOM. Tue helped out by suggesting to use mouseenter and mouseleave so I made the appropriate changes.

As of Friday the copy button was working but the code was not great and it used the text 'copy' instead of an icon. Because of this it did not make it into the 2.9 release.

Busy with an endless Android assignment that took over my weekend, I did not manage to continue to work on it. To my surprise, Duc took over the PR and made it truly great! His final version turned the button into a React component that feels a lot more at home on Telescope than my original version.

Working on this reminded me that Open Source is a team sport and we really shouldn't be afraid to get help from others that might have more experience.

Tue and I got the ball rolling and then Duc scored the goal. In the end we all win! 🔭