Weekly Telescope Podcast

On this week’s Telescope podcast is how to tame the monster and how to make one go away.

“git outta here” — Chris Pinkney

Photo by Ali Yahya on Unsplash

Last week has been pretty busy. Telescope team has shipped 1.7.0, in which we finished porting to Next.js, scrapped Gastby front-end for good, fully updated all of our dependencies, made a good progress with micro services, and finally configured Dependabot appropriately. Good job, team!

Dependency Updates

After the initial fiasco with launching Dependabot, we have been very serious in dealing with this beast. After hours of team discussions, we have formulated the following set of precautions to be followed for our second attempt:

• manually update most of our dependencies, since we had quite a few of them outdated
• remove Gatsby package file from configuration file. Dependabot will not check for outdated dependencies at /src/ frontend/gatsby
• set the open-pull-requests-limit to 1 for each of the 3 remaining package files. That would bring us to a maximum of 3 Dependabot PRs open at a one time
• disabled automatic rebases: rebase-strategy: 'disabled'. This will prevent Dependabot from rebasing each of its PRs whenever it gets outdated. We will rebase manually when we are ready to merge each pr. That would avoid having extra CI runs.

As a result, our configuration file has been modified accordingly. One cool thing that we configured is the Telescope Maintainers team, which would now be notified of any new Dependabot PRs. This way we avoid having direct account links in our code base and leave room for future adjustments on the go.

As for the less exciting, yet very needed process, I have spent a good chunk of my nights manually updating our Next.js and auto-deployment server dependencies. Overall, it was nice to learn that each npm package has a wanted and a latest versions, which might not always be identical. While testing updated dependencies, I have worked out a good habit of checking where specific dependencies are used in the project and compare how they perform with the older version. This (hopefully) allowed us to avoid additional bugs associated with the updates.

My git skills have also been affected this week, since I had to do a lot of rebases while dealing with dependencies. I’ve also tried to help our team members where I could (Mo, how are your rebasing skills now?).

List of PRs Prepared

• https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1749 — chore: bump @next/mdx from 10.0.6 to 10.0.7 in src/frontend/next
• https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1752 — chore: bump @types/node from 14.14.8 to 14.14.28 in src/frontend/next
• https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1754 — chore: bump @types/react from 16.9.51 to 17.0.2 in src/frontend/next
• https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1756 — chore: bump next version from 10.0.2 to 10.0.7 in src/frontend/next
• https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1757 — chore: bump react-material-ui-form-validator from 2.1.2 to 2.1.4
• https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1758 — chore: bump swr from 0.4.0 to 0.4.2 in src/frontend/next
• https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1759 — chore: bump typescript from 4.1.2 to 4.1.5 in src/frontend/next
• https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1761 — chore: bump @octokit/webhooks and date-fns
• https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1760 — chore: bump react-use from 15.3.8 to 17.1.1 in src/frontend/next
• https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1762 — refactor(ci): refactored Dependabot configuration
• https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1763 — chore: bump highlight.js from 10.4.1 to 10.6.0

List of PRs Reviewed

• https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1747 — Remove release-it.json
• https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1755 — Fix #1753 — Link author name to their feed URL
• https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1768 — Fix: issue 1588 — Update bull board and highlight.js dep
• https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1766 — chore: bump express-handlebars from 5.2.0 to 5.2.1
• https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1770 — chore: bump express-pino-logger from 5.0.0 to 6.0.0
• https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1771 — chore: bump sanitize-html from 1.27.4 to 2.3.2
• https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1772 — chore: bump husky from 4.3.0 to 5.0.9
• https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1773 — chore: bump supertest from 4.0.2 to 6.1.3
• https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1674 — Fixed #1641: Moved ToggleThemeButton to Header and persist preferred theme value to localStorage
• https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1774 — refactor(tidy up): Fixes #1655 — Removed unnecessary <Head>, <meta>, and <title> tags
• https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1769 — style(port): Fixes 1651 — Styles the About page
• https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1788 — #1750 — fixed Login component display in Dark Mode
• https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1785 — fix:1784 — Post search input bug
• https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1786 — Band aid 1.7 remove dark theme from 1.7
• https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1787 — Fixes #1189, Added Space Removal for Paragraphs
• https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1782 — Fixes #1252, Added Comments for Logger Discussion
• https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1783 — Fixes: #1370 Set picture in post as their natural size
• https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1789 — refactor: Fix # 1733, switch to next frontend on staging/prod
• https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/1793 — Remove Gatsby and related references from our tree