Final release

Experience of being in a community that never sleeps

At this point, I am sure reader of any of the blogs related to the Telescope project would know how amazing everyone is feeling after having contributed. The truth be told, I was exuberant too at the start. It was nice to have so much to learn from the various technologies being used. And I could have chosen anything to work on. I didn’t have to know everything about the project to work on small parts of it.

And I did contribute on it. I was constantly on the watch and helping in reviewing different PRs. I was supplying any knowledge I had to any issues. One of my friends was struggling to even compile the telescope project and see the result for themselves. Why? Because they had a windows laptop. Now I have a windows laptop too, but I rarely boot windows. I have become so much comfortable with linux command line.

So anyways, this was bizarre given that we had recently added prettier which was supposed to fix all ‘f them problems. I sent the following pull request to help our windows developers.

Fix #323: Disable linebreak style and add gitattributes by sukhbeersingh · Pull Request #324 ·…

This added a .gitattributesfile which would ensure that all line endings would be normalized. Here is what it means from https://git-scm.com/docs/gitattributes#_code_text_code

This attribute enables and controls end-of-line normalization. When a text file is normalized, its line endings are converted to LF in the repository.

I also added the eol attribute which does the following

This attribute sets a specific line-ending style to be used in the working directory. It enables end-of-line conversion without any content checks, effectively setting the text attribute.

More recently I also submitted a minor fix for updating and standardizing all error logging. Here is the link to that PR.

I would have loved to contribute more to this project, but the reality is that I had three other full time courses and bills to pay, along with the international tuition for Seneca. Hence I didn’t always have the time to dedicate to this project. Plus, this project was so fast paces because of sixty people working on it. In terms of incentive to contribute, there were only two- grades; potential knowledge for future workplace.

For the second incentive, I am reminded of the theory of Brain Capacity quoted by Sherlock Holmes in “A Study in Scarlet”,

I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has difficulty laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.

Reference:

Doyle, Arthur Conan. A Study in Scarlet: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/244/244-h/244-h.htm