Core Contributor Sprint Retro - 07 January 2023 - 21 January 2023

[Dean (www.abconlinecourses.com)]

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

There have been 486.25 reported hours during this sprint compared to 168 in the previous sprint. Gathering this data is only one way to help monitor the success of the Core Contributors project.

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

Here’s a link to register for this Thursday’s Virtual Meetup: Open edX Virtual Meetup - Open edX

Is there anything where you could use help from others? Or that you would like to collaborate on?	User
Yes, I need people from the new DevOps working group to vote in this poll on a new name for the Helm chart project: Deploying Open edX on Kubernetes Using Helm - #27 by braden (you can give two votes but if you give only one it will be more clear what people like the most).	Braden MacDonald
If you are part of the Test Team and want to feature in a short 2-minute panel at the January Meetup on Thursday 26 Jan, let me know!	Dean Jay Mathew
DevExp WG has plenty of issues ready for work. If you’re looking to get involved, just comment on any of those issues, or give us a holler in #wg-developer-experience! I am happy to help anyone find a good issue and get started on it.	Kyle McCormick
I am good to go right now.	Farhaan Bukhsh

Retrospective - Improvements	User
It might just be because I don’t work in it often, but I find WordPress incredibly frustrating to work with! I would love it if openedx.org were built in something more user-friendly (especially for non-developers). Just a pie in the sky idea.	Ali Hugo
I would appreciate if folks could take a look at the Open edX Platform Roadmap and make sure that any Open edX work they’re doing is represented and up-to-date, at least at a high level. If not, feel free to create, update, or comment on items. Let us know in #ask-tcril if you have any questions about working with the roadmap in general. We would love if this roadmap could be a one-stop-shop for figuring out the status of the many initiatives happening in the project	Kyle McCormick

Retrospective - Blockers	User
Personal Blockers: - Not enough time to volunteer unfortunately. - Hardware difficulties.	Abderraouf Mehdi

Retrospective - What went well these last two weeks / sprint?	User
Running LexiQA in Transifex was very interesting.	Pierre Mailhot
Got the chance to meet some new faces in the AMEA Community Meetup.	Ali Hugo
Caught up and progressed on a bunch of projects which hadn’t got attention since before the holidays	Xavier Antoviaque
* Gaining momentum on OARS! Huge kudos to Brian Mesick and Jenna Makowski for nutting out the roadmap and clearing the path forward!	Jill Vogel
I was more productive and was able to meetup new people in the meetup. This helped me put up names to faces.	Farhaan Bukhsh

What did you accomplish in the last two weeks (aka “current sprint”)? (Optional)	User
- review of the pull/31429 of the platform core - participate in the helm collaboration	Felipe Montoya
* Working on Open edX frontend direction for 2023 * Working on the Modular MFE domains discovery * Onboarding Jorge Londoño as BTR chair * Nominating Brian Smith as new CC * Hosting and project managing the frontend working group	Adolfo R. Brandes
- Reviewed the draft Join the Marketplace page on the Open edX site, but had trouble formatting a header image in Wordpress - Attended the AMEA Community Meetup - Announced the date and time of the next AMEA Community Meetup	Ali Hugo
Nothing much. Had discussion with the maintainers of Ralph on possibilities to merging it with event routing backends and some discussion on my PRs other than working group meeting.	Zia Fazal
Attended BTR WG meeting. Attended Core Contributor WG meeting. Attended Translation WG meeting. Attended Developer Experience WG meeting. Attended the Kubernetes / DevOps meeting. Translated strings for fr_CA in Transifex. Spent a day exploring LexiQA in Transifex for all files under fr_CA.	Pierre Mailhot
I was able to work on: 1. Frontend-lib-component issue that was reported and I am currently reviewing it. 2. Addressing the review on https://github.com/openedx/edx-platform/pull/31491 3. I have taken up review for Fix error 500 on course home page if there are no sections by DmytroAlipov · Pull Request #31516 · openedx/edx-platform · GitHub	Farhaan Bukhsh
- Core contributors work scope - conclude & move final doc to the wiki OEP-54 - Core Contributors - Define work scope by antoviaque · Pull Request #417 · openedx/open-edx-proposals · GitHub - Helm & large DevOps instances collaboration: * meeting & follow-up on proposal https://github.com/openedx/open-edx-proposals/pull/372 * project management of tickets in Issues · openedx/tutor-contrib-multi · GitHub - Upstreaming onboarding course - Ticket triage Community-maintained onboarding courses · Issue #11 · openedx/wg-community · GitHub - Help answer questions from the contibutors checkins: Core Contributors Sprints - Checkins · Issue #82 · openedx/wg-community · GitHub	Xavier Antoviaque
- I was doing some testing and configuration about this PR https://github.com/openedx/frontend-build/pull/266 - Attendeing WGs meeting	Ghassan Maslamani
* Met with Brian to discuss the Open Analytics Reference System (OARS) roadmap and tasks on the wg-data project board * Finished my first Tutor plugin for OARS, which adds Superset with SSO, and shares Open edX’s redis and MySQL database by default: wg-data#21 * Started on the next task for OARS: ntegrate Superset with Clickhouse storing xAPI events #30 * Tweaked my OARS conference talk proposal * Attended the AMEA meetup * Answered some forum posts: 1, 2	Jill Vogel
—Translations WG —MWG —Transifex	Ana Garcia
* Migrating most PyPI packages to the new openedx user. * Fix issues in openedx-webhooks and related repos which are used for verifying CLAs	Feanil Patel
Checked up on the ASU MoSHE project for the nascent Campus Workgroup	Fox Piacenti
We got some progress on the Helm charts project, and our first PRs have been opened.	Braden MacDonald

What will you work on for during the next two weeks / sprint? (Optional)	User
Planned meetings for BTR WG, Translations WG, Core Contributors WG, Kubernetes/DevOp. Probably doing translations for fr_CA as needed.	Pierre Mailhot
- Upstreaming onboarding course - Ticket triage Community-maintained onboarding courses · Issue #11 · openedx/wg-community · GitHub - Core contributors work scope - OEP approval OEP-54 - Core Contributors - Define work scope by antoviaque · Pull Request #417 · openedx/open-edx-proposals · GitHub - Contributors WG - Groom github board & tickets Triage/update tickets on the current board · Issue #83 · openedx/wg-community · GitHub - Fill questionnaire course training Recurring: - Helm & large DevOps instances collaboration: * meeting & follow-up on proposal https://github.com/openedx/open-edx-proposals/pull/372 * project management of tickets in Issues · openedx/tutor-contrib-multi · GitHub - Help answer questions from the contibutors checkins: Core Contributors Sprints - Checkins · Issue #82 · openedx/wg-community · GitHub - Review forums - Answer about access on openedx org [GH Request] Access for Xavier Antoviaque · Issue #623 · openedx/tcril-engineering · GitHub - Review PR Upstreaming Sprint W22 Community-maintained onboarding courses · Issue #11 · openedx/wg-community · GitHub	Xavier Antoviaque
- Adding a header image to the Join the Marketplace page - Reviewing the new Marketplace Overview page once it has been built - Organising the next AMEA Community Meetup (Calendar event, Zoom link, invitations etc)	Ali Hugo
Finalize my presentation about the Test Team for the January Meetup: https://openedx-meetup-jan.eventbrite.com/	Dean Jay Mathew
I will continue my work to address the reviews on the https://github.com/openedx/edx-platform/pull/31491. I will also need to review few OSPRs.	Farhaan Bukhsh

[antoviaque (Xavier Antoviaque (OpenCraft) - opencraft.com/help)]

Thanks @Dean, and @jorgeomarmh for going over some of these points during the contributor meetup.

I’m following up on some of them now, as I wasn’t there during the meeting:

@braden

I need people from the new DevOps working group to vote in this poll on a new name for the Helm chart project: Deploying Open edX on Kubernetes Using Helm - #27 by braden (you can give two votes but if you give only one it will be more clear what people like the most).

@braden Did you get enough votes on this? Looks like you have two ex-aequo but it has been running for some time, so imho you can pick one of the two and go ahead with the renaming

@ali_hugo

It might just be because I don’t work in it often, but I find WordPress incredibly frustrating to work with! I would love it if openedx.org were built in something more user-friendly (especially for non-developers). Just a pie in the sky idea.

@ali_hugo I haven’t accessed the openedx.org Wordpress so I don’t know how the situation is for it, but generally Wordpress is relatively simple to use in its default setup - it can however be different when weird plugins are installed. Or if rather than using it (for example to create new blog posts), you try to change the way it functions or looks, where it can indeed become quirky. Do you have examples of alternatives that you prefer to use? I assume you’re looking for an open source alternative here

@kmccormick

I would appreciate if folks could take a look at the Open edX Platform Roadmap and make sure that any Open edX work they’re doing is represented and up-to-date, at least at a high level. If not, feel free to create, update, or comment on items. Let us know in #ask-tcril if you have any questions about working with the roadmap in general. We would love if this roadmap could be a one-stop-shop for figuring out the status of the many initiatives happening in the project

@kmccormick Sure! Is there a way to filter the board by organization? That could likely help with this. (FYI @itsjeyd @pkulkark - could one of you check this for our projects/epics/contributions?)

[kmccormick (Kyle McCormick)]

@antoviaque

@kmccormick Sure! Is there a way to filter the board by organization? That could likely help with this.

@antoviaque Yup! From any of the views, you can filter by org using the effort: "..." filter.

[ali_hugo]

@antoviaque

Do you have examples of alternatives that you prefer to use? I assume you’re looking for an open source alternative here

Open source alternatives to Wordpress… the age-old question! I guess Wordpress is our best bet (or at least, it’s the best option I know of). However, I do feel that the current theme is difficult to work with, especially if you want some flexibility with the design. Again, I very seldom work with Wordpress, so that might be why I struggled, but in an ideal world I’d like to select a new, more flexible theme, and update it to more closely represent the Open edX brand.

---

EDIT:
Come to think of it, I don’t actually know what the brand guidelines are for Open edX! When writing the above message, I was picturing the edX brand. Does anyone know if Open edX has its own brand guidelines?

[Cassie (Cassie Zamparini)]

@ali_hugo

EDIT:
Come to think of it, I don’t actually know what the brand guidelines are for Open edX! When writing the above message, I was picturing the edX brand. Does anyone know if Open edX has its own brand guidelines?

@ali_hugo I’ve been working quite a bit with the brand, and do have a set of guidelines (attached - there are colour guidelines too). The edx.org and openedx.org brands do seem to be aligned. Revamping the openedx.org is something @e0d has spoken about doing in the past. @e0d I’ll email you about this

cc. @antoviaque
open-edx-trademark-guidelines.pdf (975.4 KB)

[ali_hugo]

Oh yes - I have seen those! Thanks for jogging my memory.

[itsjeyd (Tim Krones (OpenCraft) - https://opencraft.com/help)]

@antoviaque

(FYI @itsjeyd @pkulkark - could one of you check this for our projects/epics/contributions?)

I’d be happy to, but my hands are pretty full at the moment. @pkulkark Would you mind handling this as part of community liaison in the next OpenCraft sprint?

[pkulkark (Pooja Kulkarni (OpenCraft) - https://opencraft.com/help)]

@itsjeyd

I’d be happy to, but my hands are pretty full at the moment. @pkulkark Would you mind handling this as part of community liaison in the next OpenCraft sprint?

Sure. I’ve made a note of it to look into next sprint.

[itsjeyd (Tim Krones (OpenCraft) - https://opencraft.com/help)]

@pkulkark Great, thanks!

[antoviaque (Xavier Antoviaque (OpenCraft) - opencraft.com/help)]

@kmccormick

From any of the views, you can filter by org using the effort: "..." filter.

This is great! Thank you

@pkulkark FYI it looks like the roadmap tickets and/or the effort label on some of the tickets needs updating, as currently filtering the later for “OpenCraft” returns nothing => Open edX Roadmap · GitHub (and thanks for taking this on btw!)

@ali_hugo

Open source alternatives to Wordpress… the age-old question! I guess Wordpress is our best bet (or at least, it’s the best option I know of). However, I do feel that the current theme is difficult to work with, especially if you want some flexibility with the design. Again, I very seldom work with Wordpress, so that might be why I struggled, but in an ideal world I’d like to select a new, more flexible theme, and update it to more closely represent the Open edX brand.

Yes, I also don’t know of a better alternative to Wordpress - though it feels like there should be one, the proprietary world has come up with nicer and more intuitive ways to create simple websites. But yes, the quality of the base WP theme being used can greatly influence ease of maintenance/improvement, independently of Wordpress itself.