Since my 5th semester is ending, I want my open-source contribution to be more significant and impactful than my previous contributions. Therefore, I decided to work on an issue in the Telescope project.

Why Telescope?

Telescope is a sizeable project with a considerable amount of contributors. Since I have only contributed to the front end and the documentation, it makes sense to progress further and try working on the server side.

Issue Overview

Announce Sign-Ups in Slack #3604

humphd posted on May 16, 2022

When a new user signs up on Telescope, get a bot to announce it in a new #telescope-bot channel.

View on GitHub

Telescope has a Slack channel for community discussions and project-related activities. Like many large-scale projects, Telescope has a Slack bot that posts updates in the telescope-bot channel related to the status of issues, PRs, builds, deployments, releases, etc. However, it would be nice to get updates when a new user joins the Telescope community so that we can welcome them.

Why this Issue?

There is no shortage of open issues that deal with the backend of Telescope, but I had to pick something doable, among other tasks, before the end of the semester. Furthermore, I want to gain experience working with Slack and Discord APIs. Also, I feel more motivated to work on issues that I find interesting.

The Plan

I connected with some of the contributors of the Telescope project, including David, Josue, and Kevan, to sketch out a plan for my implementation. Since Josue has worked with the Telescope Slack bot, he was able to point me in the right direction.
I have set up the bot and have written a function that gets invoked when I create a test account on Telescope in the development environment. The function makes a fetch request to the Slack API, and a direct message gets sent to my account:

For now, I would work on improving the code and moving it from the client to the server side to deploy the changes. Eventually, the sign-up announcements will get posted to the telescope-bot channel.

Stay tuned for the updates!