Contributors Meetup Async Update - March 30th - April 12th , 2024

Working Groups Core Contributors
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Core Contributor Update: March 30th - April 12th , 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

  • Updating URL, Zoom Meeting, and Agenda
    Peter sent a link to two individuals waiting in another room, while Jorge and Adolfo discussed updating a URL in the community calendar. Adolfo suggested deleting a recurring Zoom meeting to prevent issues with the link, which was agreed upon by the group. Jorge then shared the meeting’s agenda, which included updates from Maga and Majo on security patches and issues tracking, respectively. Jorge requested a review of these updates, and a reminder would be sent in Slack if no one could provide a review.
  • Redwood Project Coordination and Documentation
    Jorge informed the team that he had arranged for Dean to assist with the testing coordination role for the Redwood project. Peter was asked to lend Dean a hand, share responsibilities for the project release, and coordinate the effort between them. Jenna introduced a new wiki space for documenting all features related to Redwood, aiming to create a singular source of truth for the project. The team agreed to update this wiki with information on their respective tasks, with a focus on the major new features in the upcoming release.
  • Streamlining Product Documentation and Integration
    Jenna introduced a new system to streamline the organization of product documentation, which includes various types of documents and test acceptance criteria for new features. The team appreciated the system’s potential to improve the release notes process and decided to adopt the Gherkin method for documenting acceptance criteria tests. They also committed to prioritizing the documentation of new features in Redwood and addressing various integration concerns. The studio facelift, which involved a new MFE, was identified as the primary focus due to its extent.
  • New Development Integration and Deployment
    The team discussed the integration of new development into their existing project. Adolfo proposed that the approach of the studio facelift should be applied to all new developments. Jenna indicated a timeline of 2 to 3 weeks to align the documentation with the code cutting. Adolfo expressed concern about potential issues with the deployment of new features, particularly with content tagging and video uploads. Peter suggested using feature flags for new features during testing, which was agreed upon by Adolfo. Lastly, Adolfo acknowledged the recent decision regarding front-end plugins.
  • Front-End Plugin Framework Approach
    Adolfo decided to implement the front-end Plugin framework approach for plugins and aimed to have at least one plugin slot or UI slot per officially released MF for Redwoods. He also suggested integrating the new learner navigation bar as a plugin. Jenna proposed having a separate line item for each, and Adolfo agreed, mentioning the need for supporting JavaScript configuration for the Tutor MFE, which currently doesn’t exist. Adolfo further clarified that the front-end pluggability framework uses a more flexible way to configure MFes, with JavaScript configuration, promoting configuration flexibility for plugins.
  • New Configuration Method and LMS Integration
    Adolfo proposed a new configuration method, which would be implemented as a plugin to ensure flexibility and reduce risk. This method, currently under discussion, may not be included in the Redwood release but is a crucial action item for the coming weeks. Additionally, plans were made to integrate an AI-powered translation feature into the learning management system (LMS) as a plugin, which could be used for AI translations or other purposes, given the LMS’s flexibility. Adolfo recommended adding an additional slot for the sidebar to accommodate this new feature. The impact on the product list and features was also discussed.
  • Project Progress and Discussion
    Adolfo informed the team that the progress of the project was being led by Jason Weston and Lung Su, and encouraged everyone to follow the Wg. Front end Channel or attend meetings for updates. Jorge reminded the team about the next important meeting set for the following week’s Thursday to provide monthly planning. Peter sought clarification on the decision-making process for the upcoming ‘Redwood’ release, and Jorge explained that the meeting would provide enough information to make a final decision, though a specific date might not be set. Chelsea raised a concern about an unresolved risk related to the left sidebar nav, and agreed to initiate a discussion with the relevant teams.

:memo: Meeting notes

1.2. Contributor Coordination Working Group

Chair: Jorge Londoño

:arrow_down: Past meeting notes 2024-03-19 CC Working Group Meeting Notes

  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

:paperclip: Latest news

  • Overview of the Course Dashboard in it’s current state: Interesting discussion about completions/progress % being added to the course dashboard/individual learner dashboard
  • Time on task and other data-related work being done by Raccoon Gang: Status update on change in roles working on this work; but will continue to update us on plugins being developed for Aspects
  • Aspects pipeline performance: A benchmark of tests have been run on the various ways to get xAPI to ClickHouse (Celery, Vector, Redis bus, Kafka bus). I’ll take a quick spin through the results and discuss the findings so far.

:memo: Meeting notes

1.4. DEPR Working Group

Chair: @feanil

:paperclip: Latest news

  • Update the OEP to match the new process listed below
    • Hopefully the new process has been updated to accommodate everyone’s feedback
      • Deborah Kaplan to draft a proposal (create a PR) to update the OEP to match the proposed changes below
  • Go through the board, move tickets to the appropriate status according to the process
    • Moved tickets around and assigned new owners to some of them.
  • Send out announcements about the changes to the DEPR process.
    • This will happen once the PR to update the OEP has been created
  • [Diana] 2U is in the process of planning out how to handle the removal of the devstack infrastructure from openedx

: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

  • Integrate Tutor with IntelliJ IDEA/Pycharm (by Qasim Gulzaredly)
    • The tutorial instructions will be published soon-ish in a dedicated space.
    • In the meantime, we can reproduce the instructions with the video recording.
    • Instructions are still hackish and a little brittle, we can definitely work to improve them.
  • MongoDb 7 upgrade: scheduled for Redwood
  • utf8mb3 upgrade. We reached the following decisions for Redwood:
    • upgrade the connection string and the database default charset to utf8mb4 for all platforms
    • For existing platforms, upgrade the default database charset (with ALTER DATABASE databasename CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;).
    • For existing platforms, convert tables in a conservative manner, using instructions similar to:ALTER TABLE tablename CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;. The list of candidate tables is available here.
    • Implementation of these decisions can be followed in this GitHub issue: We must migrate the mysql databases from utf8mb3 to utf8mb4 · Issue #938 · overhangio/tutor
  • MySQL high memory issue on Arch Linux: Really high memory usage · Issue #579 · docker-library/mysql
    • It was suggested that Arch users manually create a docker-compose.override.yml file.
    • We should update the troubleshooting instructions for Arch Linux users. Deimer Morales can you please open a pull request to update the Tutor docs?

: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 to Module Federation:
    David Joy shared insights on exploring Webpack Module Federation as a direct, less invasive approach for front-end composability, contrasting it with adopting another layer like Piral on top of existing frameworks. The goal is to achieve similar benefits but with a simpler and more direct method.
  2. Demonstration and Technical Details:
    David provided a live demo showing how an MFE (Micro-Frontend) can load content from another MFE at runtime using Module Federation, without iframes, highlighting the ease of integrating CSS and ensuring a seamless user experience. He showcased the minimal webpack configuration needed and discussed the potential for incremental adoption by exposing specific components for module federation.
  3. Benefits of Module Federation:
    Simplified architecture: The approach allows for a significant reduction in code and complexity compared to Piral, focusing on leveraging webpack’s capabilities.
    Decoupling and Independence: MFEs can be developed and operated independently without tight coupling to a shell application, enhancing modularity and flexibility.
    Incremental Adoption: The method supports gradual integration, allowing parts of an application to be migrated without a complete overhaul.
  4. Considerations and Challenges:
    Authentication and Config Management: Discussions highlighted the need to ensure authentication and runtime config management work seamlessly within this architecture, considering how front-end platform libraries could be shared or independently managed across MFEs.
    Development Workflow: Considerations on how development workflows might change, particularly around hot module reloading and maintaining independence between the shell and MFEs during development.
  5. Next Steps:
    Further Exploration: The group discussed the need for more in-depth proof of concepts to explore how existing MFEs could be integrated within a shell using Module Federation, specifically looking into authentication, configuration, and other technical challenges.
    Community Engagement: There was a conversation about staying more closely connected with the broader JavaScript and front-end development community to ensure alignment with industry standards and practices.
  6. Feedback and Concerns:
    The group expressed interest in the simplified approach but also noted the importance of identifying potential pitfalls and ensuring that the adoption of Module Federation would not lead to significant rewrites or over-complication of existing infrastructure.

: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:
    • Braden MacDonald Continued development and experimentation of Meilisearch for Studio content search.
    • GĂĄbor Boros Successfully integrated several components of Harmony into “Grove”, though some integrations are blocked on the Quince support of the Harmony Tutor plugin. Jhony Avella will pass any missing info (if there’s any) to Farhaan Bukhsh and OpenCraft will start working on Quince support.
    • Farhaan Bukhsh Will work on the Quince support of the Harmony Tutor plugin, resolving Support tutor >= 17.0.0 (quince) · Issue #61 · openedx/openedx-k8s-harmony
  • Edunext:
    • Was mainly focusing on MFEs, and investigated the implications of the recently published XZ backdoor on clusters and Amazon Linuxes.
    • The majority of WG members were absent for the past week.
    • Felipe Montoya hopes to share the K6 tests with the WG after removing internal code.
  • Raccoon Gang:
    • Planning to test a cluster with 50k - 100k users.
    • Will publish their latest version of locust, which was forked from the opened repo and maintained.
    • MoisĂ©s GonzĂĄlez is interested in the test results as eduNEXT was experiencing performance degradation in some cases.

Blockers or Calls/offers for help

  • The recent changes in the licensing of Redis is concerning and should be discussed to replace it. If yes, the should replacement be part of a Tutor plugin or not?

:memo: Meeting notes

1.10. Marketing Working Group

Chair: Eden Huthmacher

:memo: Meeting notes

1.11. Maintainers

Chair: Feanil

: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

:arrow_down: Past meeting notes Open edX Meetup - 2024-02-29 - Panel Discussion

  • 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

:arrow_down: Past meeting notes 2024-03-20 Translation WG Meeting notes

: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

  • Tuesday April 16th - Join the meetup here!
  • Friday April 26th - Async update
  • 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 30th - Apr 12th, 2024

:stopwatch: Core Contributor Hours

There was a total of 281.5 hours of contributions reported this past sprint, including 7.5 hours for Axim. This is 50.5 hours more than the previous sprint of 231 hours.

productivity
productivity1412×638 35.6 KB

The overall checklist response rate was 38% for this sprint, which is an 4% increase from last sprint.

response rate
response rate1308×478 29.5 KB

:notebook_with_decorative_cover: Summary of Responses

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

@ali_hugo

  • Does anyone know the answer to this question about how MFE footer links will be customized in the updated Studio?

@Dean

  • Welcomes people to join testing the next release! You can post a message in the BTR Slack channel, or in the General Slack channel and tag @pdpinch, or myself.

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

None

3. What did you accomplish this sprint?

@jyliugithub

  • Completed translation for Open edX platform
  • Developed content for BizDev Workshop at the Open edX conference
  • Participated in working group meetings
  • Completed survey for AWS partnership
  • Promoted Open edX Conference across social channels

@Felipe

  • Participated in Large Instances and the community release planning meeting
  • Reviewed the K8s dashboard PR in harmony (68)
  • Reviewed PRs in the context of py3.11, as well as the maintenance of packages I’m maintainer of
  • Investigated the blocker bug for the release about the MFE problem editor not rendering
  • Reviewed the last of the Wordpress PRs for package publication
  • Weighed in on the Frontend Extension Mechanisms conversation

@pdpinch

@Dean

  • Planned a meeting with BTR members to get started testing the next release

@chintan

  • Got three PRs merged

@Cassie

@jill

@ali_hugo

  • Gave UX feedback on the Resetting ORA submissions proposal
  • Tried to perform a product review on #324 (which turns out not to need one)
  • Emailed CC’s to remind them to complete the survey
  • Posted an update on the number of survey responders

@mafermazu

  • Fixed some WordPress plugin issues
  • Fixed a little issue with the tutor-contrib-codejail
  • Assisted and helped with the conference planning

@xitij2000

@farhaanbukhsh

  • Was able to review a few edx-platform PRs and test tutor harmony plugin

@juancamilom

  • Advanced the conversation / proposals in three of the proposed features for Unidigital / Campus Working Group that are to land upstream
  • Followed up with the Marketing Working Group, and prepared for the business development workshop for the conference
  • Worked as Product owner on multiple open source XBlocks being developed by the Unidigital initiative

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

@Cassie

  • Now that the Graded Discussions Proposal is in the Wiki, I can start the next steps of the Product Review process

@jill

@Dean

  • Manual testing

@mafermazu

  • Make a few minor fixes in the WordPress plugin, participate a little more in discuss and planning a conference webinar

@pdpinch

@chintan

  • Will be on 4 weeks leave from 15th April

5. What went well this sprint?

@chintan

  • Support from maintenance group is great. I needed help with test runs. When I put it forward to the group, someone always helps

@farhaanbukhsh

  • Good amount of planned work

@pdpinch

@jill

@Felipe

  • We found the solution to one of the release blockers

: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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Just noticing this question from a core contributor retrospective a few sprints ago, :

@ali_hugo Was that figured out? If not, would you (and/or @braden if there are technical points) be able to help figuring it out by contributing core contributor time on this?

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@antoviaque Initially, I thought #324 had a styling aspect, but it turns out it is purely technical. So @braden or another technical CC would have to look into this.

Here is an umbrella ticket of all the related issues.

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