telescope VS satellite

It all starts with an old 400 error that was occurring in Telescope for a while now, first documented here.

Sattelite for the back end

There are a few places to start with this, one is that we have an issue in Telescope that relates to what I think is the session no longer existing in certain situations that results in a 400. This will give me an opportunity to take a look at Telescopes auth flow. I still am kind of unfamiliar with Telescope despite having been in the last OSD course. I know that we use passport SAML in Telescope however and in the new project we will use a different library called SAMLIFY.

The project is currently in the planning phase, and being part of the development team, I have been researching ways to add relevant bits of Satellite in the Remix Blues Stack project, we intend on using for Starchart.

As a good well-established project, Telescope provides a great environment setup guide, which covers most use cases.

It's been a year since I was supposed to work on Telescope for a class. When the war in Ukraine started in February 24th, 2022, I almost fully stopped contributing. Now, this year I am trying to do more, even though it's not my class anymore. Because I wish that I did more back then.

This week, I decided to setup Telescope locally. I had previously contributed to telescope and had set it up already. However, I faced some problems starting it up locally after a shutdown and startup sequence. This was hard to debug since there was no error message, just containers on docker would not start up even after waiting for several minutes. These problems would fix after a restart or just randomly after a few tries. So, I decided to go through the setup again.

Task This week, I try to revisit my setup for running the Telescope project, a single page website that aggregates blog posts.

This week, I finished implementing the feature for filtering out irrelevant feed URLs. Previously, I had added a function for the filtering but had to write the test for it.

The two PRs(1 2) mentioned last time were merged without a hitch. For the one that's about parsing Twitch channel feed URL, the maintainer and I agreed that there should be a follow-up issue opened to expand it to YouTube Channel(s). They also found another bug in the sign-up that should exist as its own issue about the RSS feed URL(s) having incorrect domain. For details about them, please see my last post.

This week we released Telescope 2.8 and, as part of the new release, we moved the Satellite project inside of the Telescope monorepo. Satellite is the microservice framework used by Telescope.

The issue was caused by a recent PR that changed SECRET to JWT_SECRET (To use with the latest version of Satellite) without adding the required variables in env.staging and env.production.

There is an ongoing issue that I am trying to address: moving the Satellite repo inside Telescope to complete the monorepo. I haven't been successful so far, so I will ask other students to collaborate on this one, and maybe it can be done by Release 2.7.

The second thing I'd like to note is the last bit of my quote, where I will probably laugh. I can look back now and definitely laugh. Not only did I do my first release, I did my second and third. Being sheriff was overwhelming, I wanted to encourage all our contributors and push them in the right direction, ask if they required support when issues went stale, but also handle new high priority issues.

A lot happened this week, on Tuesday meeting the sheriff, went through the task to-do for release 2.6, and on Thursday it was a triage of Pull requests and issues. During the triage, I go assigned to more issues, in the area of react native, docker, and a bit of front-end fix. Also, did my first release on an open sources project in Satellite repo.

For release 2.6 I have been working on some issues already especially in satellite repo. Issues:

I opened a PR to solve this issue. I removed most of the file src/backend/lib/redis.js and some packages to fully utilize Redis connection from Satellite. After some back and forth, it got merged but a bit later Duke found out that it broke master, the backend couldn't start.

Continuing on from that blog, I ended up creating two more pull requests as I was wrapping up 0.4: #22

To start, I thought I could solve Telescopes Issue by fixing some code on Telescope or Satellite in order for the CORS errors to stop. I soon learned that the main problem wasn't fixable from our code bases and had to be fixed from Terminus.

This week, I worked on porting our ElasticSearch client to Satellite. That one was more of a pain in the ass than I thought it would be, mainly because it wasn't starting. Also, intellisense wasn't as strong as it was with Redis, so I had to turn to documentation alot, both for regular and the mock versions of ELS. You can find my PR for that, here.