Progress

For the past several weeks I’ve been working on migrating Fedora Badges to Badgr. I have completed the following tasks so far:

• Wrote an SDK for communicating with badgr-server
• Tests for the SDK
• Scripts to add, issue, revoke badges
• Openshift templates for deployment

I’m currently working on adding FAS authentication to badgr-server as well as trying to work out my approach to the fedora-messaging middleware that will issue badges. I’ve learned a lot while working on these tasks including testing (which I did for the first time), OpenShift, and several nuances related to python.

Issues

I’ve gotten stuck with many issues over the coding period, some more facepalm than others. For example, I wasted almost a week trying to get my setup running on docker-compose only to realize that the problem was just mislabelled services. In another one, while writing a script to initialize a MySQL db I put a space after the ‘-p’ so my builds kept failing.

Of course, these issues shouldn’t have taken more than a couple of hours to figure out but more often than not it took days. All this reminds me of the struggle I had when I started learning JavaScript. Trusting the environment/ecosystem did not come easy. It was normal for me to think that the bugs that I was getting were because of a bigger force that I did not understand yet. This would force me to blindly go on an expedition to really understand what’s going on.. only to realize that the issue was right in front of me and I never needed to read anything beyond the files that I wrote. However, even after the time I had lost the net result was always positive. The more ‘blind expeditions’ I went on the more knowledge I accumulated and the more confidence I gained to commit.

A bigger hurdle for me has been adjusting to the work-from-home lifestyle. Especially with the pandemic my entire routine has been disrupted and finding a balance has been a challenge.

Going Forward

Needless to say, I’m much better off than before and I’m excited to work on my following tasks. My mentors, Sayan, and Michael have been extremely helpful in clearing my doubts and guiding me. I’m also more excited to code more as since the beginning I’ve been reading more docs than writing code. The next few weeks will be taxing but surely fun.