First of all Dave! My apology for not following the instructions that you provided in release 0.3. I was debating about it. On one hand, I understood I needed to do an external PR. On the other hand, I wanted to continue spending time understanding Telescope. It has growth on me. How about I gave a bonus — 2 failed PRs that I attempted for Telescope? but before that, let me talk about my successfully merged PR.
I decided to start working on NextJS migration and decided to port the theme for a start. Since we use MUI for our UI library, I continued to configure the theme in MUI way. One problem is that this time, it involved TypeScript and TypeScript did not like our current theming. The reason is because we wrote it in JavaScript and we included property that is not the default property of MUI theme object. Yes, TypeScript is quite strict in that sense. After discussing on Slack and talked to Telescope’s team, I thought it would be a good idea to change the current theming to the way MUI theme object is to ensure smooth transition to NextJS with TypeScript.
I made a few mistakes and commit quite a few PRs before it got merged. I actually spent pretty half the day working on it to ensure everyone who was reading my PR understand the purpose that I was trying to achieve. Dave also suggested me to update the docs as well to provide better information of how we do theming to new contributors. Moreover, I needed to explain to Dave why I did the thing I did because he is not doing that much theming for Telescope. This is a good lesson for me because if I could not explain it then I probably would not understand it.
Before this PR, I actually have two failed PRs. The first one is when I tried to configure the frontend testing environment for NextJS. It turned out to be a failure as the config files got polluted and did not perform as expected. It was disappointing not to get it worked after trying every single solution I could find from the internet. However, I learned that it would be better to separate the frontend and backend to different repos. The second failed PR was when I suggested social media sharing for Telescope’s blog post. It seemed to be a cool idea at the beginning, but turned out Telescope’s team prefer to have a clean look and avoid anything that they do not need at the moment. This one took me less time and I got to learn about component library that actually does social sharing. You don’t have to write many codes, just import and use the components. Overall, I actually attempted to make 3 PRs within the course of a week. Pretty impressive I would say :D!
Thank you for reading
Tony Vu.
