UI, git, communication, tasks

This week has been me mostly setting up the environment and figuring out semantics of working with someone else's branch. I know I used to do that, but I no longer remember..

I was confident in my CSS abilities, front end isn't new to me. However, I have forgotten one major important detail. It's all in React. CSS too. I am not used to its structure at all, so making any small changes is now extremely difficult, since I struggle to find the parts I need. I am now sceptical in the idea of me being a member of the front end team.

Front end team task!

I am glad others remember how to use git, because I don't. Being assigned to a team helped greatly, I feel much better asking stupid questions in a smaller circle. I had to do a remote... a uuuh... detached head or something... Yea, it gets weird like that sometimes.

Something I found that I didn't expect was that short meetings were more effective than explaining things through text. To me it would actually work the opposite way, but people struggled to understand what I meant until I said it in a voice meeting.

What we found during the meeting is that there are many smaller fixes to be made. Not only we need to just change the columns to rows, fix their positioning.. But also make a new button, which would carry the old behavior and return the previous button behavior to existing title. We also decided to not let the user to open the whole post information that might take up the whole screen if the title of the post is in the fixed position at the top. Instead, we will move the screen to the beginning of the post and then have it expanded with details. This way the user can still scroll past it, and only the title will snap to a fixed top position just like before.

Challenges that I've faced so far are fixing the list of repos (as it currently keeps just going in a single line, instead of going to new lines);

And I also don't know how I would implement the screen moving to a certain location, especially with React. Maybe that part should be delegated to my teammate?

Sheriff

This week's Sheriff was doing pretty well. I saw him spam Slack with pings of people that were working on something. He also did a good job in the triage meeting. All this is a great example of how things should be done, and is also very intimidating to me, since my turn will come in a few weeks D: I really want to do a good job, but I don't think I will be able to. It's not just leading the meeting in voice, but also delegating people to tasks I don't fully understand.

Triage and after

During this week's triage I have found myself excited about too many topics. I took on a couple things that interest me, but also made an issue myself. I also keep looking at the oldest issue we have - it's about documentation. I don't want to sign myself up for too many things, even though I don't have to complete all of them in a single week.

That old issue would require me to look at a lot of code, studying what each thing does so that I could summarize it for others. Considering that I have currently no clue what any of the code over there does - I am reluctant to get on that one.. I also am worried how I would have to deal with rebasing, since I haven't yet. Maybe I would need to only target one area at a time, and only do a PR once it's complete, so that the code I just commented doesn't get rewritten right away with the new versions.

There is this issue about code colors. I liked it because I will get to choose colors myself, although I don't currently know how to exactly implement it. At least I know I can rely on myself with choosing the right colors, if not in my coding.

The final thing I gotta work on is my original idea that got steered towards using GitHub projects. Now that the plan is decided, I actually need to start searching for smaller projects and assigning issues to existing structures. It will take some time, but I would as well learn about the project much more. I also now have someone else to work on this with! But the task is so huge, I don't even know where to begin with this.. (well, no, actually, I do. I even have a plan!)