Aug 15, 2018 • rhuturajm
Experience with developing Treehouses CLI for OLE as a virtual intern | Open Learning Exchange | Treehouses by Rhuturaj Mehta
Try & Try till you succeed. - William Hickson
That is what it is, in one-line, my experience as a virtual intern at OLE while working on developing Treehouses CLI.
You may be wondering whats Treehouses CLI? Well it is essential a Command-Line Interface for the treehouses system image. It can be run using the terminal. To look at it in a simple way it is like your personal technical assistant which can do all sorts of amazing things such as getting your RaspberryPi connected to wifi or bluetooth or setting up your RaspberryPi as a hotspot (which is my personal favorite).
To be able to contribute in developing such an awesome tool was a challenge at first. My first introduction to CLI happened during a typical RaspberryPi Hangout Wednesday session. I was assigned a simple task of updating the markdown (a language I picked up thanks to OLE) readme file of the CLI. The aim was to explain the keywords at the bottom in a simplify language for users to understand. The task looked like a really easy introduction to Treehouses setup. But when I looked back at it know it essentially dictates everything has to be kept simple. And thats the beauty of CLI.
Further, tasks where similar in nature where I had to improve the code to make it more explanative and simple. And this all helped me in my understanding of Treehouses CLI development. Then, came the testing part of CLI on RaspberryPi & thats where the fun begin along with a lot learning. It was a simple but a methodical process. Step 1 download the latest treehouses image and setup up your RaspberryPI with it. Here, I got introduced to a magical tool called “Etcher”. It almost never fails me! Then you run the image on your RaspberryPi. Step 2 open the readme file of CLI and just test out every command listed there or you could just type-in “treehouses help” the terminal of your RaspberryPi and all the commands that the CLI can carry out will be displayed. Make sure you are making notes cause any error or bug detected will help in improving it! It never felt to me that I was doing testing of the CLI it was more like I was playing around and exploring it.
Shell-scripting that’s what CLI is built-in & while playing around with CLI, I started learning it like a 5-year old would pick it up any vocal language. After, a period of learning I was ready to contribute in a better way. But that’s when it gets challenging. First, you need to find an issue with CLI or pick one up from the Github Repo of Treehouses CLI. And then you need to start writing the code. One of the easier issues that was addressed by me was “Treehouses image” which tells you the release version of treehouses image you have installed.
Sounds easy and it is easy but it took me me while to make the whole thing one-line code. And thats where I learnt it isn’t about just writing a code to get the output it is more about developing the code to make it as easy as you can! This I believe helped me progress as a developer and OLE played a major role in that regards.
I have faced difficulties while working on other issues while improving other CLI features but the OLE RaspberryPi team has helped me whenever I have been stuck & that’s why the first thing you need to learn when you plan to be a virtual intern is “communicate”.
It has been a different experience but now I can look back and say that I made a contribution to this awesome tool. But there are many issues to be ironed out & “requests to be pulled” to make CLI more awesome!