Contributors Meetup Async Update - July 22nd, 2023 - August 4th, 2023

Working Groups Core Contributors
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Contributors meetup Async Update

July 22nd, 2023 - August 4th, 2023

Welcome to our Core Contributors async update!

1. Working Groups Updates

Working Groups Calendar :calendar:

BTR Working Group

Contributor Coordination Working Group

Data Working Group

DEPR Working Group

DevEx Working Group

DevOps Working Group

Educators Working Group

Frontend Working Group

  • Chair: @arbrandes
  • Headlines:
  • Allow @openedx-namespaced NPM packages to be built · Issue #806 · openedx/axim-engineering
  • Update on Piral and Modular MFEs:
    • Refer to frontend-app-shell for installation instructions (temporarily in Pedro’s repository, will move to the openedx org this week)
  • Enzyme deprecation discussion:
    • Should we fully remove enzyme or use the adapter react-unit-test-utils
      • It makes sense to use the current industry standard (React Testing Library): it’s just likely to be more time-consuming to rewrite the existing tests to it. However, FED-BOM would still prefer to use RTL, and since they’re going to do the brunt of the work across the frontend repositories, there were no objections.
      • Some repositories - likely the ones owned by Aurora - will use react-unit-test-utils, but that’s also ok. One of the reasons to have MFEs in the first place is to give code owners some freedom in decisions of this kind.
  • Unit vs Integration tests:
    • Unit tests are a way to document what the code should do and also speed up development iteration, so they should definitely not go away
    • Integration tests are valuable too, but one does not exclude the other
    • Ideally tests are written using both techniques where they’re best applicable
  • Meeting notes:
  • Blockers or Calls/offers for help:

Large Instances Working Group

  • Chair: @braden & @felipe
  • Headlines:
  • OpenCraft:
    • Gábor Boros: I reviewed monitoring PR, sorry for not posting the review on time. Braden MacDonald: Been working on deploying sandboxes using our k8s infrastructure. Lots of issues related to Tutor/Palm/edx-platform versions (nightly, palm, master) and getting them all to work together. Gábor Boros: I’ve been working a lot on sandboxes for PRs and we mostly have it working! MoisĂ©s González: At a recent internal hackathon, we were exploring using ArgoCD to trigger deployments based on a PR.
  • Racoon Gang:
    • Maksim Sokolskiy : From time to time, we have to support old versions of Open edX. Recently we had to work on Hawthorn. It wasn’t working on M1, but I got it working with a bit of patching. Still having trouble with ElasticSearch though.
  • eduNEXT:
    • MoisĂ©s González: Looking into deploying MFEs with a CDN. The tutor prod setup doesn’t let you change the public URL setting at build time, so need to resolve that. Felipe Montoya: We probably want to alter the index.html file directly to put the CDN path in there, to point to all the .js, .css files etc. on a CDN, and then the Tutor image can host only the index file. Q: Why is index.html not also on the CDN? A: to be able to change it quickly and easily. Also, sometimes we want to deploy the MFE at a subfolder, not a separate domain.
  • 2U:
    • Jeremy Bowman: Continued work on devstack upgrades, getting ARM images for it, continuing to research devstack vs Tutor dev vs k8s based environment. Q: is any ansible used in building the container images still? A: No, ansible is gone. Maybe a few random services still use it, but all the main django services don’t use ansible anymore. Just uses the Dockerfile that’s in each repo (dev and prod variants of each).
  • Harmony project updates: Review list of PRs and issues, and assign anything un-assigned.
  • Meeting notes:
  • Blockers or Calls/offers for help:

Marketing Working Group

  • Chair: Eden Huthmacher
  • Headlines:
    • LWMOOCs - small booth
    • Open edX meet up
      • Generative AI with 2 Axim employees, new CTO Philip Smith
    • Dedicated marketing page for MWG on Open edX website
    • Redesign the default platform footer
      • All Open edX sites should have a footer
  • Meeting notes:
  • Blockers or Calls/offers for help:

Maintainers

  • Headlines:
  • We need to converge on a plan for phase 3 rapidly. Ideally we could kick that off immediately.
    • react-unit-test-utils was bumped, per Slack convo from phase 2 to phase 3.
    • Based on other conversations about maintenance plans, we pulled edx-platform into phase 3. We’ll need to coordinate plans for supporting it with Jeremy Bowman
    • We also added frontend-app-learner-dashboard to phase 3 scope.
    • Edward Zarecor will coordinate pulling in all Aspects related repos to be maintained by Axim for phase 3.
  • Ned Batchelder will work with 2U maintainers to move repos from pending to confirmed as quickly as reasonable. He’ll come back with a proposed schedule for that.
  • Feanil Patel will write up an ADR on OEP-55 to propose that all new repos much come with a commitment to maintain them.
  • Meeting notes:
  • Blockers or Calls/offers for help:

Product Working Group

  • Headlines:
    • Core Product: Strategy doc has gone through feedback loop with WG
    • Next steps: Open to community feedback, working session for Assessment Core capability
    • LTI: MVP focuses on configuration and reuse
    • Next steps: Proposal open for review
    • UX/UI:
      • Mobile: Approved new mobile applications as default future Open edX mobile applications. Draft of Open edX Mobile Product Vision / Direction is in review by the subgroup, with more work in the coming weeks to unpack this. Current development focus is on the Project - Learning Site Selection (FC-25a) capability to help providers build 1 iOS and 1 Android application for their clients and thus expand the use of the mobile applications for much lower cost than previously possible. Additionally, a funded contribution focused on updating mobile APIs is also in development.
  • Meeting notes:
  • Blockers or Calls/offers for help:

Security Working Group

TOC

Translation Working Group

2. Events

3. Projects

Would anyone like to highlight any new or ongoing projects?

4. Next async update and meetup

  • Tuesday August 8 - Join the meetup here!
  • Friday August 18 - Update async!
  • Details and draft agenda on the GitHub board

Please reply to this post with any questions or comments you may have!

2 Likes
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Core Contributor Sprint Retro - 22 July 2023 to 4 August 2023

You can find the full report in Listaflow: https://www.listaflow.com/

Do you need any help? Or is there anything you’d like to collaborate on? User
Reported a translation problem with frontend-app-communications not harvesting strings or being in Transifex. Pierre Mailhot
What should we improve? Any blockers? User
None None
What did you accomplish this sprint? User
OEP for escalation process to TOC - Sign in to GitHub · GitHub
PR Delays discussions - Contributor's Meetup 2023-01-24 · Issue #85 · openedx/wg-coordination · GitHub.
Onboarding Upstreaming Course -Prepare & do test video interview Community-maintained onboarding courses · Issue #11 · openedx/wg-coordination · GitHub.

Recurring:
Core sprints - Recap & answers Issues · openedx/wg-coordination · GitHub
Forum moderation.
 Xavier Antoviaque
* Updated API documentation
* Making progress on some edx-platform Auth cleanup
* Work with other Axim folks to start updating and moving the developer guide to the new documentation site.		 Feanil Patel
I presented the internal work our team is doing for HMS at the Core Product Working Group. There is general interest from the community!
I am in the process of setting up a call with HMS, and Jenna to see how we can align this work with the Modular Learning Initiative. Jenna will also present some of the new tools in the works to HMS.
I completed some design deliverables for the Marketing Working Group (the assets will be used at the LWMOOCs conference).		 Cassie
Attended the UX/UI Working Group meeting, and planned the agenda for the following one.
Attended the Core Product Working Group meeting.
Attended the monthly Scrum of Scrums Working Group meeting.
Reviewed the wireframes 2U is working on for the search functionality on the LMS.		 Ali Hugo
Attended Built-Test-Release Working group meetup.
Attended Education Working group on AI.
Translated and reviewed strings for fr_CA in Transifex.
Reported a translation problem with frontend-app-communications not harvesting strings or being in Transifex.
Browsed through Slack.
Browsed through Discourse.		 Pierre Mailhot
Continued adding further transformers for forum events and created this PR. Zia Fazal
Reviewed a filter contributed by Arbisoft for an enterprise feature: Sign in to GitHub · GitHub
Participated in the large instances WG.
Reviewed the ADR for the enrollment APIs for wordpress ecommerce.
 Felipe Montoya
What do you plan to work on in the upcoming sprint?
OEP for escalation process to TOC - Sign in to GitHub · GitHub
PR Delays discussions - Contributor's Meetup 2023-01-24 · Issue #85 · openedx/wg-coordination · GitHub.
Onboarding Upstreaming Course -Edit test video interview Community-maintained onboarding courses · Issue #11 · openedx/wg-coordination · GitHub.
Xavier Antoviaque
Will continue to add more transformers Zia Fazal
I’ll be on leave for the next sprint. Ali Hugo
I plan to complete the HMS Custom Pathways Product Spec internally. I also intend to align our spec more or less to how the Product Specs are being drawn up in the Open edX Wiki. Once this is done, I can re-share the spec with community, and we can begin a proper discussion with HMS and the community at large.

I’m also going to see whether ASU Baobab representatives are keen to meet with Jenna re their project, and in turn Jenna will present some of the new Modular Learning Initiative tools.		 Cassie
Built-Test-Release Working group meetup.
Open edX Contributors meetup.
Ecommerce Next Steps update meetup.
 Pierre Mailhot
What went well this sprint?
There was some nice sharing of UX ideas between the work done on the Studio search and on the LMS search. Ali Hugo
I had a successful response from the Core Product Working Group about the initial Product Work being completed for HMS. I look forward to seeing how this story unfolds :slight_smile: Cassie
Seeing enterprise features of edx.org using openedx-filters is great. Felipe Montoya

A total of 228 hours were reported this sprint, down from 319.25 and 238.75 in the previous two sprints:

Name Hours
Brian Mesick 70
Feanil Patel 40
Andrés González 20
Maria Grimaldi 20
Ali Hugo 16
Jill 12
@antoviaque 10
Zia Fazal 9
Felipe Montoya 8
Gabriel 6.75
Cassie 5.25
Pierre Mailhot 4
Fayyaz Ahmed 3
Piotr 2
Matjaz Gregoric 1
Dean Jay Mathew 1
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This was discussed at the contributors meetup, cf the notes:

Pierre indicated Brian Smith and Adolfo were already looking into the issue. A conversation ensued about who is currently maintaining the front end app communication, with Maria suggesting that Adolfo is temporarily maintaining it, until eduNext takes over. Jorge offered to reach out to Adolfo for more on this, as Pierre observed that this micro frontend is mandatory for Palm and this issue could be significant for different languages.

@arbrandes You seem to be already on this, is that correct? Any blocker?

See the transcript or the video recording for more details.

4

I haven’t heard back from @arbrandes yet, but in the meantime, and this will show up in my next update, I found a similar problem with the translations of the new visual problem editor in frontend-app-course-authoring. And in this case, the translations are not directly in frontend-app-course-authoring but imported from frontend-lib-content-components.

Since this is an MFE, I wonder how it will play along with the possibility of adding custom translations to an MFE in Tutor GitHub - overhangio/tutor-mfe: This plugin makes it possible to easily add micro frontend (MFE) applications on top of an Open edX platform that runs with Tutor. since the json file is not directly linked to the MFE.

@ghassan was suggesting that it could be a case of the Jenkins jobs to push resources to Transifex not being properly set up. But who is responsible for setting up these jobs? Is it a case of the maintainers for these repositories? Is it a case for the Translations Working Group who is made of a lot of Core Contributors but not necessarily of people with Code Contributors roles? This may not be well documented.

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@Natalia_Choconta does this mean completion.enable_completion_tracking waffle flag disablement doesn't remove the progress tracking UI · Issue #245 · openedx/wg-build-test-release · GitHub is still being worked on? Because it seems to just be slipping release to release (during which time I’m losing all my Google Analytics data because I can’t upgrade because of this blocker, and I can’t use the new Google Analytics on old Open edX…)

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It’s in our radar, yes! There’s no blocker per se, but I haven’t been able to devote any time to the issue in the past two weeks. I’m setting aside some time on my next sprint to look into it further.

Likewise for the above. :point_up_2:

2 Likes
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Hello @ABC, I am going to mention @jalondonot here to help us solve your doubt.