Core Contributor Update: Sep 16 - Oct 3, 2023
Use the jump links below to view the section that interests you:
1. Working Groups Updates
1.1. BTR Working Group
Chair: @jalondonot
Latest news
- Action Items for Q release
:
- Identify MFEs and new repos earlier and review the processes for enabling them. Advocate for better documentation and easier configuration while thereās still time to make changes.
- Resolve the release blocker conversation with an initial approach: How to categorize an issue as a release blocker? Ā· Issue #292 Ā· openedx/wg-build-test-release
- Update test sheet with new test cases
- Quince release planning:
- Quince release work plan
- Near deadlines:
- Mon 2023-10-09 -
quince.master
- Mon 2023-12-11 -
quince.1
- Early red flagsš©:
- Django 4.2 upgrade (ask Axim Ned - 2U Jeremy Bowman)
- Confirming Deanās role
- Which MFEs will be included in Quince?
Meeting notes
1.2. Contributor Coordination Working Group
Chair: Jorge LondoƱo
- How do we make sure strings in frontend-app-communications are sent to Transifex?:
- These are included as official in Olive.
- The message are properly handled in the code, but they are not being pushed to Transifex.
- FE App Component is another issue, it is not tagged as itās a library. Thereās also a bug for this library that needs to be address. Adolfo Brandes has context on this issue and will investigate.
- Related bugs and Slack threads:
- Slack thread on frontend-app-communications:
- Slack thread on problem editors:
- Review needed on opaque keys PR:
- fix: type hints werenāt installed properly, add type hints for Django Fields by bradenmacdonald Ā· Pull Request #259 Ā· openedx/opaque-keys
- Maria will review, Stefania will ask Ghassan and Alexz will try to get someone from Raccoon Gang.
- List of repositories that are included in named releases, but donāt have a maintainer, Release repos
- The goal is still to include all dependencies from the Open edX stable releases, including edx-platform
- Start date? Pilot Phase 3 indicates Aug 1st 2023
- New data September 7th
- TOC Decision Requests : Looking for suggestions, comments and questions about OEP-63
- Contributors Meetup - Call for participation & meeting time poll
1.3. Data Working Group
Chair: @e0d & @blarghmatey
- FC updates
- Redis bus last PR delayed
- Rory on through Oct
- Possibly more Aspects FCs to speed up v1
- Aspects updates
- v1 report missing data being gathered - mostly completions and grading
- Last discussions PR merged!
- 300m load test and performance enhancements in progress
- 4 tickets left for beta
1.4. DEPR Working Group
Chair: @feanil
- We have a profile MFE. Should there be a DEPR ticket for removing the legacy page from edx-platform?
- We think itās still used in Edge, but that should be fixable
- The MFE may not be at full feature parity yet
- This ticket references removing/deprecating the old profile page: [DEPR]: Account pages ā micro-frontend Ā· Issue #71 Ā· openedx/public-engineering
- Some old context: Deprecation/Removal: Legacy Frontend Implementations (DEPR-17, DEPR-42, DEPR-109)
- Next steps:
- Can we announce this deprecation? - got a volunteer
- Maybe give two weeks for acceptance?
- Once this is accepted, the code can start being deleted.
- The comment period for xQueue xQueue-watcher has passed with some requests for delaying the deprecation. What comes next?
- Deprecation: xqueue / xqueue-watcher
- [DEPR]: xqueue and xqueue-watcher Ā· Issue #214 Ā· openedx/public-engineering
- Usually this means we will push out the acceptance dates/leave things in āproposedā until we have a good solution/migration path for the people affected.
- MIT is planning on switching to Vocareum Ā· Cloud Learning Labs Ā· CS, ML/AI, Cloud Computing, & More
- Owner of the ticket should be the one to update with new dates.
- Last Old Mongo removal PR of FC-0004 has merged! (barring regressions)
- Upcoming Axim-funded projects that will likely kick off new DEPRs eventually, but not yet: Prototype for safer XBlock rendering in the LMS.
1.5. DevEx Working Group
Chair: @Rebecca_S_Graber & @kmccormick
- a 2U enterprise team is trying out OEP-37 dev data
- (anyone can try that out!)
- OrbStack is in 2U vendor review
- 2U is likely to recommend OrbStack (closed-source) for Devstack, with Colima (F/OSS) as a recommended alternative
- Kyle still using improved Tutor build prototype, RĆ©gis is reviewing
1.6. DevOps Working Group
Chair: RĆ©gis Behmo
1.7. Educators Working Group
Chair: @john_curricume
- Demo of open-response assignments with custom rich text editor via Summernote
- Abilities to download, save, and write multiple drafts
- āBackpackā functionality that allows you to save and retrieve student data from earlier open response problems. Thereby allowing you to have a kind of first-draft, second-draft, and so on system.
- Resources:
- Course Template Builder with hx-js and backpack included (easiest method): HX Template Builder
- GitHub - Colin-Fredericks/hx-js: Collecting some javascript from HarvardX all in one place.
- GitHub - HarvardX/js-input-samples: JS Input samples for using with edX platform
- Proposed ORA Enhancements - Juan Camila Montoya (EduNext)
- TurnitIn Integration
- Configurable Weights for Assessment Scores
- Learner Re-submission Option
- Human Readable Activity Dashboard for Instructor
- CTA: Juan is looking for feedback on these proposals
- Survey: Potential extensions for ORA-2
- LWMOOCs conference (October 11-13) is accepting Poster Submissions
- Reach out to Mary Ellen Wiltrout on Slack or via the LwMOOCs website: IEEE LwMOOCS 2023
Blockers or Calls/offers for help
- Looking for any and all documentors!
1.8. Frontend Working Group
Chair: @arbrandes
- Dealing with the recent frontend-platform upgrades
- Revert react-redux 8 and react-intl 6 upgrade, and re-release with just react-redux 8 as major version
- Deal with React 17
- Then react-router-v6
- Then react-intl ā formatjs
- Frontend-Build Alpha PR issues (axios):
- feat: bump to frontend-build alpha by muselesscreator Ā· Pull Request #1148 Ā· openedx/frontend-app-learning
- Failed run w/ jest change: feat: bump to frontend-build alpha Ā· openedx/frontend-app-learning@5eb02fd
- without change: feat: bump to frontend-build alpha Ā· openedx/frontend-app-learning@afa1e7b
- Learning MFE Modal options: feat: allow override of plugin.modal height by muselesscreator Ā· Pull Request #1184 Ā· openedx/frontend-app-learning
- Node alternatives (Bun, Deno):
- Bun just hit version 1.0 and has been getting a lot of buzz. How much if any appetite is there for exploring the value in using one of these?
- Thereās interest, but also concern about having so many popular tools bundled in as custom implementations (especially test framework)
- May be a good experiment for a Hackathon
- TSX?
- Hackathon PR updating component to use TypeScript
- Get community feedback on PR, use that to create ADR (will supersede this one)
- Write documentation on TypeScript in component best practices
1.9. Large Instances Working Group
- eduNEXT
- Researched MySQL HA options to run inside Kubernetes. Jhony Avella will create an issue to open the conversation on this topic in the Harmony Project
- Experienced problems hosting ClickHouse in Kubernetes because of the amount of resources it consumes. An external machine running the service was implemented as a workaround, however, other options like using a ClickHouse cloud service could be considered.
- Jhony Avella worked on fixing issues related to infrastructure creation on Harmony PR 41. He will work on the Karpenter implementation through Helm.
- 2U
- Worked in a container runtime comparison to drop docker-desktop.
- Exploring Kompose as an option to bring developer environments to Kubernetes.
- OpenCraft
- Worked on Grafana dashboards for monitoring.
- GƔbor Boros already provided feedback on the PR 41 in harmony. Some comments are still pending to be addressed.
- Thereās no ETA for the assessment to determine if the Harmony project could be used in production installations.
- RaccoonGang
- Working on running ClickHouse and superset in Kubernetes.
- Analyzing alternatives to deploy production OpenedX instances with minimum resources. Some options include the classic Kubernetes Local installation and Kubernetes deployments with lighter K8S distributions (K8S single server?)
- Testing Harmony to deploy OpenedX. Positive feedback was provided.
1.10. Marketing Working Group
Chair: Eden Huthmacher
- Next (quarterly) external conference to attend - LWMOOCs (October 2023)
- Educause - only as attendee, since there were no co-sponsors
- Next Open edX meetup featuring Thai MOOCs and Cap-Net (UN Education Program) - register here: The Open edX Platform: Increasing Access to Underserved Learners
- Next quarterly conference proposal: Bett in London
- TOC nominations will start on August 29th - please look out for the blog announcement next Tuesday and help spread the word to get more voters involved
- Looking for recommendation on voting apps - we used CIVS last time
- We are looking for the following voter profiles:
- Operator & Core Community Representative - elected by the projectās Core Contributors and Maintainers
- Instructor Representative - elected by all individuals producing or running an active course on the Open edX platform
- User/Learner Representative - elected by everyone using the Open edX platform in any capacity
- OKR Review (starting at item 16): OKRĀ“S MWG
1.11. Maintainers
Chair: Edward Zarecor
- Feanil:
- Aximimprovements is ramping up an thatās going well.
- Could probably take on a few more repos for maintainance. Candidates
- edx-notes-api
- repo-tools
- Feanil Patel to reach out to owning team.
- Adolfo
- Many MFEs are stuck an old FE platform version because of breaking changes.
- Translation bug fixes for Comms and Course Authoring MFEs in progress:
- Ed
- Will close out phase 2
- Will move phase 3 into in progress
- Reached out to Aribisoft about maintaining event-routing-backends, will pull into phase 3 if possible.
Blockers or Calls/offers for help
- Urgent need for FE plugability
- Examples of business specific code that was committed. This canāt be our normal course of dealings.
- Related problem, different spin
- Problem to solve: How to extend MFEs in business specific ways
- Ed is going to schedule a summit to propose a specific recommendation for solving this problem.
1.12. Product Working Group
Chair: Jenna Makowski
- UX/UI Working Group
- Jon Fay from 2U took us through the latest version of the designs for the new Studio Home page (feel free to leave comments and questions on the file). A few things we discussed:
- the UX for filtering and sorting courses,
- when course end dates should be displayed and when they might not be necessary,
- what type of content is searched when the user enters text into the search bar.
- Santiago from EduNext ran a mini usability test with Cassie from OpenCraft. The test focused on 2 of the main user flows within the Content Tagging MVP:
- One: the flow in which content authors add tags to units,
- Two: the flow in which users search the course outline.
The test lead to some interesting realizations! EduNext will be conducting the same usability test with a handful of superusers, and Ali Hugo will then update the wireframes for the MVP accordingly.- Mobile Working Group
- Since our last update, we have kicked off a number of projects in development and discovery. During our weekly meetings we have reviewed a number of documents as well focused on identifying the gaps between the edx mobile app and the new open edx mobile apps. Additional details below per project.
- Mobile API Updates - #fc-0031-mobile-api-migration-axim-raccoongang
- Development has started to update edx-platform and other services with the right API changes necessary to run the new open edx mobile application. (Approximate delivery date end of September.)
- Quick Win Feature Gap Project - In Consideration
- In consideration is a project that should close 13/38 of the feature gaps identified by edx mobile team relative to new open edx mobile apps. A few improvements to video experience (5/13), app upgrade messaging (3/13) and others are included here. Development sizing and product / design definition are in progress currently - Project - Quick Win Feature Gap List
- Learning Site Selection - In Consideration
- In queue for mobile development consideration, should allow for providers to build single apps for multiple open edx sites / clients to lower cost to offer a mobile experience to learners - Project - Learning Site Selection (FC-25a). Initial set of product requirements and design mockups available on project page for review.
- Other projects in consideration that are earlier in the requirement definition process listed below:
- Project - Improved Mobile Discovery (FC-28a)
- Project - Offline Mode Discovery (Text + Problems) (FC-28c)
- Project - Course Dates, Personalized Schedules, and Calendar Syncing
1.13. Security Working Group
Chair: Feanil Patel
- Vision-casting: Where do we want to go in the future for proactive security work?
- Areas
- 1st-party dependency security upgrades
- Maintenance Board
- 3rd-party security upgrades
- Maga is working on creating process in BTR for Django
- Code
- XSS linting on edx-platform
- What are the top possible improvements?
- 3rd-party security upgrades
- Django security linters
1.14. TOC
Chair: Ed Zarecor
1.15. Translation Working Group
Chair: Eden Huthmacher
- Next meeting: September 1st
2. Events
- LWMOOCs conference (October 11-13) is accepting Poster Submissions
Reach out to Mary Ellen Wiltrout on Slack or via the LwMOOCs website: IEEE LwMOOCS 2023
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 youād like to discuss? Get the conversation started in the comments below.
4. Next async update and meetup
- Tuesday Oct 3 - Join the meetup here!
- Friday Oct 13 - Async update
- Details and draft agenda on Confluence
Anything to add?
If thereās anything else youād like to mention, please let us know in the comments below.
At least if weāre talking about manual steps to add to PR review workflows, I think it would be challenging to get all teams to adopt and consistently apply those to the repos that they own. Offloading this type of work to a bot (as you suggested) would probably be a better option here.
