Yesterday the team shipped Telescope 1.9.5, and brought us one step closer to our 2.0 goals. I spent a lot of time mentoring, debugging, reviewing, and also writing code in this release, and wanted to write about a few aspects of what we did and how it…
I collaborate on content with a lot of different people. As a software developer, almost all of my work is done in git and GitHub. As a professor working at a large institution, most of it is done in Microsoft Office, email, or increasingly, in Teams. Lately I've been thinking…
We're going to ship Telescope 1.8 later today, and I wanted to write about some of the things I worked on and learned in the process.There have been a number of themes in this release:A new approach and pace to dependency updatesUpdating our UI for the 2.…
Over the past two releases, the current group of Telescope maintainers is slowly starting to find their way. The process takes time, and there are bumps along the way. But we're becoming more of a team with each passing week.I find that those who have trouble getting deeply involved…
I spend a lot of time helping students review and debug their code. During the pandemic, it's all I do some days. Doing as much of it as I do, I wanted to say something about the value of plain text over screenshots when asking for help with code.I've…
Last winter I worked with an excellent group of students to develop and release Telescope 1.0. This year I'm gearing up for another round of development, shipping a 2.0 Release with a new group of equally gifted students.I'm not 100% clear what our goals are yet for…
tldr; I made you a little birding web app for Christmas with Begin.com and Next.js to help you find Snowy Owls in Canada. The code is here.On the Healing Powers of a Side ProjectI've finally finished the semester, and am ready for a holiday. The past three…
I'm happy to announce that tonight we have released Telescope version 1.4.0. This was a big release, and included contributions from 36 new contributors to the project. A huge thank-you to everyone who was involved in this release!Here are some highlights of what we shipped:Many large…
This week I began teaching another round of our introductory Open Source courses, DPS909 and OSD600. Despite our new online reality, I've got the largest group I've ever had, which is a bit intimidating (especially since this isn't my only course).Teaching online has lots of challenges, but in the…
I was chatting with a student today who couldn't figure out why his scripts wouldn't run. He was doing everything correctly, but still the commands failed with a bizarre error. I asked to see the output. Here's an approximation:PS C:\Users\student\OneDrive\Computer Programming\Assignments & Tests\assignment4&…