Core Contributor Sprint Retro - 04 February 2023 - 18 February 2023

Working Groups Core Contributors
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Find the full report attached or in Listaflow for your convenience: https://www.listaflow.com/

Here’s a link to the community public calendar: Open edX Working Group Calendar

Is there anything where you could use help from others? Or that you would like to collaborate on? User
One of the next steps for community TOC members will be to iterate over the TOC election rules - so if you haven’t already, it’s the last occasion to comment on Elections - Additional feedback? Xavier Antoviaque
I’m receiving the reminder for this checking late on Friday when I no longer see the email. Then I’m answering sometime on Monday when it is late already. Anyone else having this issue? @Felipe
Retrospective - Improvements User
In hindsight, I could’ve spent more time thinking of meaningful/interesting discussion points to add to the AMEA meeting agenda. That may encourage more community members to attend. Same goes for agendas of other community meet-ups. @ali_hugo
I merged a PR last week (feat: added organization dropdown in studio by Ian2012 · Pull Request #30975 · openedx/edx-platform · GitHub), which added a dropdown for organizations in studio. I tried testing the feature thoroughly, but it still caused some issues for instructors on edx.org. The error happened when turning on the feature flag: SPLIT_LIBRARY_ON_DASHBOARD, which we missed completely, since that flag is turned off by default and unittests didn’t catch it. Anyway, I wonder if we could’ve caught that earlier or our QA could’ve been better. I’ll keep this in mind for future contributions. @mgmdi
Retrospective - Blockers User
personal blockers. Less time to contribute and a failing personal machine. @ARMBouhali
Retrospective - What went well these last two weeks / sprint? User
I was able to attend 2 community meetings, and have a better feeling for the PR product review process. Ali Hugo
What did you accomplish in the last two weeks (aka “current sprint”)? (Optional) User
Made progress on Spike: Integrate Superset with Clickhouse storing xAPI events #30 – superset + clickhouse installed with demo xAPI events. @jill
- Performed a product review on PR #6820
- Attended the Product Working Group Meeting
- Organised and attended the AMEA meet-up, and posted a recording and summary afterwards		 Ali Hugo
- participated in the helm for large instances meeting and ensuing discussion.
- merged OEP-45 :: ADR-002: Deploying Open edX on Kubernetes Using Helm by bradenmacdonald · Pull Request #372 · openedx/open-edx-proposals · GitHub
- created [GH Request] Create group to manage CC access to openedx-k8s-harmony · Issue #665 · openedx/tcril-engineering · GitHub to get the permissions sorted out for the harmony CC program
- reviewed edx-platform/pull/31431 and helped it get ready for merging		 Felipe Montoya
- Create DevOps subgroup - Register the group as a formal working group - Discovery · Issue #12 · openedx/openedx-k8s-harmony · GitHub
- OEP-54 Scope PR - Chase merge blockers - https://github.com/openedx/open-edx-proposals/pull/417
- Start preparing conference talk - Talks preparation · Issue #89 · openedx/wg-community · GitHub
- Upstreaming course - Review suggestions & PR - Community-maintained onboarding courses · Issue #11 · openedx/wg-community · GitHub
- TOC Meeting - Prepare & attend

Recurrent:
- Review forums: Internal & official
- Core sprints - Attend & post answers to questions - Contributor's Meetup 2023-01-24 · Issue #85 · openedx/wg-community · GitHub 		Xavier Antoviaque
Mostly attended meetings or watched recording of meetings.
Tried answering a few posts on Discourse.
Browsed through Slack channels.
Reviewed / Translated a few string for fr_CA in Transifex.
Away for 2 days on vacation (Feb 16-17).		 @sambapete
Continued work on issue 249 of event-routing-backend @Zia_Fazal
- (team) review of https://github.com/openedx/edx-platform/pull/31588 – planning to merge on 2/20
- reviewed updates to the release notes process on the wiki page Process to Create an Open edX Release 		@pdpinch
Our helm chart project has a new name, openedx-k8s-harmony : GitHub - openedx/openedx-k8s-harmony: A Prototype Helm Chart for deploying multiple Open edX instances (via Tutor) onto a cluster. @braden
What will you work on for during the next two weeks / sprint? (Optional) User
Finish Spike: Integrate Superset with Clickhouse storing xAPI events #30 – create superset dashboard + charts to display problem_check events. Jill Vogel
- merge some community PRs and do a release of edx-sga xBlock.
- review readmes for repos likely to be included in the palm release to provide better context in the release notes.
- get feat: add course mode expiration explicit to admin by collinpreston · Pull Request #31289 · openedx/edx-platform · GitHub merged		 Peter Pinch
Unknown at this time. Pierre Mailhot
I will be keeping an eye on the list of PR’s ready for product review and reviewing the ones I can. Ali Hugo
- Contributors WG - Groom github board & tickets
- Contributors working group creation - Write draft
- Elections - Reply & draft proposal
- Upstreaming course - Remote sprint

Recurring:
- DevOps WG - Attend meeting & follow-up
- Core sprints - Attend & post answers to questions		 @antoviaque

2023-02-04 - 2023-02-18.pdf (28.9 KB)
2023-02-04 - 2023-02-18.csv (67.9 KB)

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@ali_hugo Was the issue that the meeting had too few people? Giving a topic can definitely help – also sometimes reaching out individually before the meeting to people you or other attendees would like to know more can be quite effective.

And +1 that the attendance issue can be an issue in a number of meeting. @jalondonot actually brought up an interesting conversation about this during the contributor meetup, and came up with interesting improvements to try out – I’ll let him explain it though :slight_smile:

@Fox_Piacenti ^ It looks like we still have issues with the notifications:

  • As @Felipe mentioned above, they now arrive at seemingly different times than before, and it can be a bit late in the day to see it in time before completion. Others in the contributors meetup agreed, and we discussed that it would be better to receive the first notification on Thursday (mid-day seemed fine - ie noon UTC), and the second one early on Monday (so midnight / 00:01 UTC)
  • Also @mgmdi mentioned that she hasn’t received a notification since January - and if that’s the case for her, there might be others in the same situation?

We had an interesting discussion about this during the contributors meetup - the root cause of the issue seem to have been that the configuration on stage was different than on production, and as a result the testing done on stage didn’t allow to spot the issue. So the QA and review process employed seem to have been fine, but it would be worth investigating & fixing the configuration difference on stage for feature flags, to allow to spot similar issues in the future. @mgmdi will bring it up with the people at 2U/edX with whom she has been in contact for this issue.

Sprint updates

And as usual, I’ve grouped together the different updates from the report above, to make it easier to read & digest:

  • Dev:
    • Analytics: Progress on integrating Superset with Clickhouse, storing xAPI events (@jill|)
    • Event routing backend (@Zia_Fazal)
  • Large Instances DevOps:
    • The project has a new name, openedx-k8s-harmony (@braden)
    • Merged ADR on OEP-45 Deploying Open edX on Kubernetes Using Helm (@Felipe)
    • Work on formalizing the working group & managing permissions (@antoviaque, @Felipe, @regisb)
  • Core contributors - work scope definition merged (OEP-54 amendment) (@antoviaque)
  • Documentation:
    • Reviewed updates to the release notes process on the wiki (@pdpinch)
    • Upstreaming course - Review & discuss contributions with new contributors, prepare remote sprint (@antoviaque)
  • Events:
  • TOC Meeting - Prepare & attend (@antoviaque)
  • Translations in French Canadian (@sambapete)
  • PR Review (@ali_hugo, @Felipe, @antoviaque, @pdpinch)
  • Answered questions on the forum (@sambapete)
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Partly - there were 5 of us. Although 5 isn’t too small of a group, I think it would’ve been more fun/interesting/valuable for everyone had we been able to entice more people to join.

I think the biggest issue was the agenda I put together. It was —quite frankly— pretty boring! The discussion points didn’t lead to very meaningful conversations, and I suspect some community members may have left the meeting thinking, “Was that really worth my time?”

That said, I think the way to solve this could be as simple as putting together a well-thought-out agenda, adding some unexpected discussion points, and scrapping the introductions (which I’m sure everyone is a bit tired of doing). CC @farhaanbukhsh who is planning the next meet-up.

I agree - great tip!

Hmmm, intriguing… I’m interested to find out more! :male_detective:

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Ah! I know what caused this. The reminders were set for ‘two days before the end’. But then we introduced the concept of a due date which was later than the end date, and made the reminders based on offsets from the due date. The due date was then made two days after the end date, which pushed back all the reminders by two days.

I’ve fixed this. The reminders should now go out Thursday and then once more on Monday. Please let me know if the reminder timings work better for everyone this time around :slight_smile:

@mgmdi is from Edunext which is using Google’s email servers. I’d be surprised if these aren’t being delivered since so are we. @mgmdi have you checked your spam folder? If you see the emails there, could you let me know be sure to manually mark them as not spam? In any case, please message me on slack so I can help investigate further. If anyone else is having the issue, also please message me :slight_smile:

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The last email I got was for the sprint from Jan 7 to Jan 21. I also checked my spam folder, but there’s nothing there. I’ll wait for the next check-in and let you know if I don’t get it! :wink:

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