Contributors Meetup Async Update - March 16th - March 29th , 2024

Working Groups Core Contributors
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Core Contributor Update: March 16th - March 29th , 2024

Use the jump links below to view the section that interests you:

  1. Working Groups Updates
  2. Events
  3. Projects
  4. Next async update and meetup

1. Working Groups Updates

Working Groups Calendar

1.1. BTR Working Group

Chair: @jalondonot

:paperclip: Latest news

  • They’ve decided to postpone the Redwood cutting session and wait until the next Redwood release monthly planning, on April 11, to get a final update on the ongoing projects’ progress. Based on that information, determine and schedule the definitive date in April for cutting Redwood.
  • MFEs in Redwood - any new ones? Can the build time actually handle any new ones?
    • To stop OOMs when building: limit number of builds that happen in parallel.
    • Impact on those building with CI infrastructure?
    • Full build takes 2+ hours for RG, new MFE would be ~20 extra minutes.
    • Adolfo will follow up with Glib and David Joy w.r.t Piral project.
  • Plugins and JS configuration support

Blockers or Calls/offers for help

  • Calls for help/bug reports
    • Jorge Londoño will post a call for help in the Community channels for filling the vacant BTR roles.
  • The Release Testing Coordinator position hasn’t been filled yet

:memo: Meeting notes

1.2. Contributor Coordination Working Group

Chair: Jorge Londoño

:paperclip: Latest news

  1. Release Coordinator for Redwood: Jorge Londoño highlighted the need for a release coordinator for the Redwood release. Discussion about the role between the protocol group and BTR working group ensued. Adolfo Brandes mentioned Peter Pinch volunteered for the role, with some reservations.
  2. Plug Ability Summit and Implementation Decision: Adolfo Brandes discussed a second Plug Ability Summit to decide on competing implementations for frontend communications. The goal was to decide which implementation to move forward with and if it could be included in the Redwood release.
  3. GitHub Milestones Proposal: Adolfo Brandes proposed using GitHub milestones in every repository for upcoming releases to better organize epics and tickets.
  4. Elephant Factor Increase and Core Contributors as Backup Reviewers: Discussion on increasing the “elephant factor” by expanding maintainers and the role of core contributors in reviewing pull requests. Emphasis on filling gaps where there is a lack of maintainers.
  5. Feedback and Iteration on Core Contributors’ Sprint Check-ins and Retrospectives: Discussed the importance of gaining feedback through surveys to improve sprint check-ins and retrospectives. Mentioned a low response rate to the survey and the need to encourage more responses.
  6. Use of Slack vs. More Asynchronous Communication: Touched on the use of Otter for meeting transcriptions and the potential for working group hosts to decide on their transcription methods.

:memo: Meeting notes

1.3. Data Working Group

Chair: @e0d & @blarghmatey

:arrow_down: Past meeting notes 2024-02-21 Meeting notes

  • Aspects V1 Product Requirement Document in progress: Aspects V1: Product Requirements
  • Event bus updates: Brian Mesick is going to do some work on prototyping a Tutor plugin that will let people easily configure and run the Kafka or redis backends, test changes, and experiment with the event bus. Looking for feedback on the direction and desire for such a tool.

:memo: Meeting notes

1.4. DEPR Working Group

Chair: @feanil

:paperclip: Latest news

:memo: Meeting notes

1.5. DevEx Working Group

Chair: @Rebecca_S_Graber & @kmccormick

:arrow_down: Past meeting notes 2023-12-04 DevEx Meetup Notes

:memo: Meeting notes

1.6. Tutor Users’ Group

Chair: Kyle McCormick

:paperclip: Latest news

  • Auto-mounted directories
    • Can we add mount keywords in our own plugin? → yes, or open a PR to upstream plugin
    • Do we list the keywords anywhere? example, platform-plugin-
    • The exact list is not documented anywhere
  • MFE mounts
  • Let’s talk about MFE image building… why we (usually) don’t need to re-build, and figuring out this Docker build cache madness. (RĂ©gis Behmo )
    • Theoretically, rebuild should only happen if (1) we change an MFE and (2) we’re pushing it to production
    • Errors when installing node_modules
    • npm error, socket reset, registry hangup
  • Docker build cache size needs to be set large enough so that it doesn’t get garbage collected between mfe builds
  • Talked about Use the new edx-platform assets build + other improvements by kdmccormick · Pull Request #34 · kdmccormick/tutor - kyle will continue to work on
  • Production vs dev flow in docs - docs nudge you towards production flow
  • Remote image building - anyone?
  • edunext has - they build tutor-nightly images on an ec2 instance
    • 20-30 minutes for uncustomized mfe image
    • custom multiarch builder - regis builds macos images even though he doesn’t have a mac

:memo: Meeting notes

1.7. Educators Working Group

Chair: @john_curricume

:arrow_down: Past meeting notes 2024-02-12 Educator WG

:memo: Meeting notes

Blockers or Calls/offers for help

  • Looking for any and all documentors!

1.8. Frontend Working Group

Chair: @arbrandes

:paperclip: Latest news

  1. Introduction and Welcome Back to David Joy: Adolfo Brandes welcomed the attendees and highlighted the return of David Joy to the team. David will be working on the Piral project in the coming months.
  2. Debugging and Tutor Setup for Development: The group discussed setting up Tutor for development purposes. Adolfo offered to help David with this, mentioning an issue linked in the chat about configuring modules with Paragon and Tutor.
  3. Discussion on TypeScript and Frontend Build: Muhammad Abdullah Waheed Khan raised a concern about merging an alpha branch into the master for the frontend build that includes TypeScript support. He suggested using a separate wrapper for TypeScript configuration to avoid adding TypeScript dependencies across all micro-frontends (MFEs) that don’t use TypeScript, thus preventing future dependency issues.
  4. Proposal for Handling TypeScript in MFEs: After much discussion, the group leaned towards a solution that involves keeping TypeScript configurations in a separate config package rather than including them in each MFE. This approach aims to minimize redundant dependencies and simplify maintenance.
  5. Paragon and TypeScript: Fox Piacenti informed the group about a pull request by Brayden for adding types to Paragon, indicating a move towards enhancing TypeScript support.
  6. Decision on TypeScript and Frontend Builds: The group concluded to experiment with merging the TypeScript configuration changes into the alpha branch of the frontend build and testing it with other MFEs to evaluate its impact.
  7. Discussion on Plugins and Configuration: The meeting ended with discussions on the use of plugins in the learning MFE sidebar and potential challenges with configuring and building plugins alongside other code. The group discussed separating runtime and build configurations for better management and flexibility.

:memo: Meeting notes

1.9. Large Instances Working Group

Chair: @braden & @Felipe

  • Updates from each org on the call - 2U, Edunext, OpenCraft, Raccoon Gang
  • OpenCraft:
    • Continued development of Meilisearch for Studio content search - see thread on Discourse.
      • Gábor Boros is working on removing functionality from OpenCraft’s internal “Grove” tool and migrating to Harmony. Making good progress. Encountered some issues with installation etc. so opened several PRs to Harmony to fix those. One other minor issue encountered is that the migration to Harmony causes the load balancer to be replaced and a new cluster IP assigned; but that’s expected and manageable.
  • Edunext:
    • has been working on drydock to manage k8s deployments in a more gitops oriented way. Added the ability to put annotations on the jobs so that ArgoCD will run them in a specific order. Now, they’re able to initialize the instances using the tutor-defined jobs/order.
    • has been experiencing performance issues in a couple of installations that are running on bare metal servers. Wondering if anyone has guidelines around best practices for bare metal. (By “bare metal” they mean it’s a very large instance and they install kubernetes onto it.)
    • had a customer worry about their shared ArgoCD instance - if they ever need to change providers, worried it’s hard to replicate. So eduNEXT is interested in moving to 1:1 ArgoCD per Open edX instance, and wanted to know if there would be interest for incorporating ArgoCD into Harmony.
    • Braden MacDonald said that sounds interesting and we should explore it as an option.
    • MoisĂ©s González asked what load testing tools others use. They have used functionality built into Grafana and New Relic, but are interested in other tools especially ones that can incorporate profiling and compare instance.
    • Felipe Montoya : it would be good to collaborate on building a standard performance measurement tool for Open edX instances. Is anyone interested?

Blockers or Calls/offers for help

:memo: Meeting notes

1.10. Marketing Working Group

Chair: Eden Huthmacher

:memo: Meeting notes

1.11. Maintainers

Chair: Feanil

:arrow_down: Past meeting notes 2023-09-07 Maintainers’ Meeting notes:

  • Mongo 7 Upgrades:
  • Python 3.12:
    • Tooling to Detect Python Version?
    • Repo health dashboard might be able to get this from classifiers.
    • 3.12 Update is now the highest priority maintenance item for Redwood, please prioritize it over other maintenance work.
  • Paragon Maintainer:
    • Currently no maintainer listed.
    • Joint maintainership between Axim and Opencraft probably makes the most sense.
  • Redwood Cut
    • Did this move? Is it still April or May?
      • Neither, we’ll do the cut Apri 23(ish) unless we push it further when we get closer

:memo: Meeting notes

1.12. Product Working Group

Chair: Jenna Makowski

:pushpin: Relevant links

:memo: Meeting notes

1.13. Security Working Group

Chair: Feanil Patel

:arrow_down: Past meeting notes 2023-07-26 Security WG Meeting

:memo: Meeting notes

1.14. TOC

Chair: Ed Zarecor

  • The TOC members discussed the development of privacy-preserving educational research platforms, with a potential project partnership and funding for Open edX. They also shared updates on Open edX adoption and community involvement, and strategies to improve the long-term sustainability and extensibility of the platform. The board members discussed challenges and strategies for maintaining open-source repositories, including identifying which repositories to maintain and which to deprecate, the need for maintainers, and the impact of breaking changes in non-maintained repositories. They emphasized the importance of transparency and fairness for maintainers in open-source projects.
  • Action Items:
    • Xavier to check if Otter has a setting to warn participants about recording/transcription prior to the meeting
    • Axim to send a proposal for transitioning 2U developers to core contributors rather than direct commit access, as well as reviewing 2U roles, access and permissions.
    • RĂ©gis to open a discussion on the forum about open course material, and share the link with the TOC mailing list.
    • RĂ©gis to investigate the state of Open edX extensibility and propose improvements to existing mechanisms, leveraging the work of other contributors
    • George to share the list of repositories 2U will maintain with Feanil and the maintenance working group once it is approved internally

:pushpin: Relevant links

:memo: Meeting notes

1.15. Translation Working Group

Chair: Eden Huthmacher

:memo: Meeting notes

2. Events

  • We are excited to announce the 2024 Open edX conference! The conference will be held at Stellenbosch University in Cape Town, South Africa and will take place between July 2nd and July 5th, 2024. Register here to secure your seat!
  • Would anyone like to highlight any past or upcoming events? Let us know in the comments!

3. Projects

Are there any new or ongoing projects you’d like to discuss? Get the conversation started in the comments below.

4. Next async update and meetup

  • Friday March 29th - Async update
  • Tuesday April 16th - Join the meetup here!
  • Details and draft agenda on Confluence

:speech_balloon: Anything to add?

If there’s anything else you’d like to mention, please let us know in the comments below.

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Core Contributor Check-in: Mar 16th - 29th, 2024

:stopwatch: Core Contributor Hours

There was a total of 231 hours of contributions reported this past sprint, which is about 226 hours less than the previous sprint of 457 hours.

Productivity
Productivity727Ă—321 15.5 KB

The overall checklist response rate was 34% for this sprint, which is an 11% decrease from last sprint.

Response Rates

:notebook_with_decorative_cover: Summary of Responses

1. Do you need any help? Or is there anything you’d like to collaborate on?

@chintan

  • Can anyone confirm if learners are having issues unenrolling, or if this is a configuration mistake? See this issue.

2. What should we improve? Are there any blockers?

@ayazquraishi

  • Suggests leveraging formal calendar invites, and a formal meeting note structure for all WG meetings.

3. What did you accomplish this sprint?

@chintan

  • Made progress on PRs. @feanil was able to help determine that the 3.12 python upgrade is not suitable for all python repos. Instead 3.11 will be used for many of them.
  • Joined more WG meetings, and gave input in some of them.
  • Moderated the forum - moved some topics and deleted some spam posts.

@jyliugithub

  • Developed content for the Open edX conference BizDev workshop.
  • Translation work for the on Open edX platform.

@jill

@ali_hugo

  • Product review on the UX update to the Resetting ORA submissions proposal.
  • Attended Core Product Meeting.
  • Worked on the talk @Cassie and I are presenting at the conference in July.

@farhaanbukhsh

  • Reviewed some PRs and left comments on a few.

@Felipe

  • Reviewed the Teams to Content Groups connection PR.
  • Participated in Large Instances and Maintainers WG meetings.
  • Reviewed the outstanding PR in the WooCommerce adaptor.
  • Started planning for the Paragon design tokens project.

@antoviaque

  • Was on leave last week, but worked on these topics:
    • Contributor Meetup and Coordination board update.
    • Meeting transcripts - getting Otter support to activate email warnings, testing Fireflies.
    • Review and moderating forum.

@Zia.Fazal

  • Reviewed a couple of edx-platform PRs (34358 & 34387) Reviewed couple of xblock PRs. (32& 68) Reviewed an ERB PR

@ayazquraishi

  • Began Core Contributor training.
  • Reviewed material for upcoming conference.

@Cassie

  • Product Review for Libraries Relaunch
  • Created Core Contributor Check-in Report
  • Worked on conference talk with @ali_hugo
  • Completed the Learning Technologies Stand Design
  • Designed the Open edX Conference Social media Adverts including Ambassador posts

@mafermazu

  • Planned webinar to be shown at the conference.

@pdpinch

4. What do you plan to work on in the upcoming sprint?

@jill

  • Implementing and documenting Aspects scaling options.

@pdpinch

@farhaanbukhsh

  • A few tickets lined up for Harmony and frontend-app-gradebook repo.

@chintan

  • Complete the 3 PRs I raised, and make them 3.11 instead of 3.12.
  • If time permits will take up some new work.

@ali_hugo

  • I have very limited hours for CC work in April, so I will be focussing on any pressing items that may come up.

5. What went well this sprint?

@chintan

  • Community support was great, despite being new to these meetings and work, it’s always inclusive.

@pdpinch

  • I’m excited about the collaboration between BTR, Product WG and dev teams on the Redwood release. It seems like we will have a lot of interesting new features.

@jill

@farhaanbukhsh

  • I started following up on the Frontend WG, and was willing to work on Harmony.

:speech_balloon: Questions or comments?

Please add any questions or comments you might have below. We’d love to hear from you!

And if you’d like to take a peek at the full report, see it on Listaflow .

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@chintan Have you been able to get confirmation on this? Maybe through the upcoming redwood release testing?

@ayazquraishi There is actually a formal calendar with events for all working groups, see https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/COMM/pages/3707371565/Active+Working+Groups#Joining-Working-Group-Meetings - though you are not the first one to ask for this, so it might not be obvious to find. Is there a place where you would have expected to find that information, where we could put it? Or maybe there are some meetings missing there?

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Not yet @antoviaque but I haven’t been in touch with release team yet. As I haven’t had time to take a deep look into it. Just saw this issue in forum and was able to reproduce it so raised it.

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