Setting up Telescope

Setting Up Telescope

For this lab, the first step needed was to set up the telescope development environment. And that was were most of the difficulty of the lab came from. I had not used a linux environment in over a year so it was nice to see that the telescope documentation introduced me to the WSL(windows subsystem for linux) tool for windows. Once I had installed and set up all the necessary software needed to run telescope (WSL2, Redis and Elasticsearch specifically), I ran into an issue where the /posts part of the local environment I would need to work with my link checker was resulting in an error and the json array I was expecting was being returned blank. The next problem and bigger problem I had was that instead of consulting my peers in the class about this error I instead just struggled with it alone and this resulted in continued procrastination and falling further behind. The feelings of adequacy preventing me from collaborating with my classmates and peers, is a recurring theme that has really prevented me from being as successful as I could be in this open source journey. In the end, I finally several weeks later figured out the reason why the environment wasnt working as expected was because I was attempting to run Node.js from the powershell terminal in vscode while I was running the elasticsearch and redis prerequistes from WSL. Once I added the WSL terminals to vscode, I  was able to run the enviroment as expected and get the json array I needed from the /posts url. Now I was ready to move on to using this to check the links using my link checker, DeadOrNot. 

Checking Links Using my CLI

Fortunately this part of  the lab was not too difficult as I already had an idea of how it would do it while I was struggling to get telescope to work. My link checker was already set up to run by reading from a file, so what I needed to do for the telescope option was create a file from the telescope server instead of taking the filepath from the command line. I used the requests library to first get the JSON from the /posts url and then iterate through that JSON and access each post and get the url continued the json from that request. Once I had those urls I wrote them to a file and then passed that file through to the core of my link checker which ran as regularly expected. Using this method was helpful because it allowed me to still use all my other flags and options in combination with reading from the telescope server. 

Final Thoughts 

From this lab, the biggest lesson I learned was that I have really under utilized the opportunity I had with this course by not making using of the resources I have in my peers. If I want to be successful in software development beyond this course, the feelings of inadequacy I feel when I get stuck on something and the prideful attitude I have towards asking for help when I need it, is something I am going to need to change. It has already greatly impacted by success in this course but I hoping I can at least use the little time I have left in OSD600 to began to change those attitudes. 

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