Lab 5 - Getting a Thimble testing environment to run

Let's just begin this lab by saying although I am loving the experience, working in an open source environment can be very frustrating. Things don't work, you don't know why, and you feel yourself getting smaller and smaller as you dig deeper into directories and files that you have never seen before. I want to thank the lovely folks on Thimble that helped me through every step of the way, including of course our very own professor!

Of course, this was to be expected. My bug, which at a glance seemed easy enough, but it required that I have a testing environment setup so I could start tinkering around with the code in order to squash this big. In order to reproduce the bug, I needed to be logged in so that I have access to a view that allows me to publish a project, or not to do so, in order for it to only be saved in that account. This leads to the name of the project being saved, but not the description. As such, I dug into the README file, and followed the steps described on there to a T in order to avoid any issues...

Installing Brackets and Thimble and running both allowed me to view the code editor, but it didn't allow me to login. In order to do this, I believe I need the services up and running in my test environment. 
I went through the instructions in the README file @gideonthomas pointed to, however after days on end of trying I couldn't seem to figure out why I wasn't not able to run this command. Having already installed everything that is needed prior, when I ran
npm run env
npm install
vagrant up

 this is what I would see:

At first I thought I wouldn't bother anyone, and I would try to fix the issue on my own. Of course, this lead to nothing. Posting a comment on my bug page lead to our professor telling me the README file was actually wrong! Turns out the order of commands should have been:

npm install
npm run env
vagrant up

Surely enough that, and having Brackets running would do it right? Nope.



As you can see I still had errors because the module "is-reachable" could not be found. After a brief back and forth with our professor, and @gideonthomas, a new bug was filed for this issue, along with a temporary fix to run in the console:

npm install is-reachable

This actually fixed the issue from above and allowed me to see Thimble's code editor.



So close! All I needed to do now is click on Sign In and attempt to recreate the bug!



Both the Sign In and Log In pages did not work at all. It's back to the workshop. Our professor suggested that I go on Thimble's chat on Mattermost where I could talk to some other devs and students who had faced a similar issue before. I saw that one of the prior suggestions was destroying Vagrant and building it again. That didn't work. Then another suggestion was reinstalling both VM Virtual Box and Vagrant. That didn't work either.

This was when I realized I needed to speak up and ask for help once more. Surely enough, within a couple of minutes someone pointed me to this comment:



And as you can see:



That worked! I now have my testing environment up and running, after such a huge a huge struggle for so many days. I should have spoken up earlier and maybe I would have had this issue fixed a long time ago. This was a very good learning experience, and it marked my week with this bug.

Long story short, I made no progress within the code, other than having a few ideas in my head after looking at it in Sublime. However, I did learn to speak up, and not be afraid to ask for help because everyone so far has been so helpful and nice to me. I encourage anyone who is in the same situation as me, of feeling like they want to ask for help but can't to just do it! These folks are passionate and want you to succeed!

So to recap, this week, got a Thimble testing environment to run. Doing this lead to discovering a new bug and it being assigned, and finding that there is an issue folks are currently working on, which has a temporary fix for now.

The goal for next week will be to have made progress with the actual bug I was assigned, rather than finding new ones 😭 I will be sharing my experiences with you all on here, so stay tuned!

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