Core Contributor Sprint Retro - July 8th - July 22nd

Working Groups Core Contributors
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This is the retrospective for the most recent Core Contributor (CC) sprint from June 24th - July 8th:

1. Calls/Offers for Help

This is what the core team needs help on now. Note that anyone can help – you don’t need to be a Core Contributor (yet!) for that. The question was “Is there anything where you could use help from others? Or that you would like to collaborate on?”

I’d like to understand why the various frontend packages seem to have a lot of conflicting dependency specifications and if there’s a reason why so many core packages don’t even support React 17. Context: fix: support running this frontend in "developer mode" on Tutor · openedx/frontend-app-library-authoring@76c1756 · GitHub Kyle McCormick
What is a CourseOutline? What is a CourseOverview? When/where do they get created? Why do I seem to be missing them sometimes? Peter Pinch
Reviews needed on the draft charter for the election of the TOC community board members – see TOC Community Members Elections - Brainstorm thread - #3 by antoviaque . We will need to discuss further some of the TOC elections aspects - like whether to include learners in the voting or not. Xavier Antoviaque
@maria - let’s work together on getting some of the course stuff defined that you were asking about Sarina Canelake

2. What went well?

What went well these last two weeks / sprint?

Made progress across diverse initiatives. Edward Edward
There are a lot of documentation improvements going on!!! Maria Grimaldi
Coordination with edX/2U is getting smoother :slight_smile:
Discussions about the CC nomination process were productive, and helped clarify our policies.		 Jill Vogel
We’re starting to make better connections between the product working group and the BTR working group. I’m looking forward to having more and better forward-looking information feeding into the release process. Peter Pinch
Many governance topics moving forward! And good discussions and advances on them recently. Xavier Antoviaque

3. Improvements and Blockers?

Did you experience any blockers or have suggestions for improvements?

Retrospective - Improvements User
Improvement: I completely forgot to attend the virtual community event :cries:. From now on, I’ll block my calendar so this doesn’t happen again. Maria Grimaldi
The backporting process is pretty convoluted, especially when it involves adding a patch to Tutor. Kyle McCormick
We seem to have run into a lot of issues with nutmeg and database configurations. Perhaps this is inevitable with the migration from mongodb to mysql, and the fact that our table character sets, etc. may not be in sync with edx.org. I am concerned however that tutor users have reported similar issues, e.g. Emoji in subsection title not supported since Nutmeg - #3 by pdpinch Peter Pinch
The migration process from older versions, especially from native to Tutor, is complex and problematic Andrés González
Retrospective - Blockers
My other client work is taking up all my brain space at the moment, so I’ve found it hard to make time for CC. Jill Vogel

4. Hours contributed

The total reported hours contributed for the latest sprint (14 days): 289.5 hours :chart_with_upwards_trend:

User Hours Contributed This Sprint
Edward Edward 60
Kyle McCormick 60
Andrés González 50
Sarina Canelake 20
Xavier Antoviaque 17.25
Gabriel D’Amours 12.75
Braden MacDonald 12
Igor Degtiarov 12
Juan Montoya 12
Felipe Montoya 10
Maria Grimaldi 8
Peter Pinch 6
Dean Jay Mathew 5
Pierre Mailhot 3
Jill Vogel 1.5

The totals of the hours reported in the last thirteen (13) sprints: 2421.22 hours

Feanil Patel 222
Andrés González 197
Sarina Canelake 186.25
Piotr Surowiec 170
Kyle McCormick 150
Xavier Antoviaque 132.4
Edward Edward 130
Gabriel D’Amours 112.25
Ali Hugo 111.82
Felipe Montoya 95
Maria Grimaldi 92.75
Zia Fazal 88
Peter Pinch 81
Ghassan Maslamani 80.25
Braden MacDonald 64
Igor Degtiarov 55
Dean Jay Mathew 50
Kshitij Sobti 41
Adolfo Brandes 40
David Ormsbee 40
Pierre Mailhot 39.25
Juan Camilo Montoya 38
Jillian Vogel 35
Matjaz Gregoric 29
Giovanni Cimolin 28
Sofiane Bebert 20
Jhony Avella 16
Usman Khalid 13
Juan Montoya 12
Nizar Mahmoud 10
Steffania Trabucchi 10
Omar Al-Ithawi 7.75
Esteban Etcheverry 7
Nicole Kessler 7
Ilaria Botti 4
JayRam Nai 4
Jill Vogel 1.5
Chintan Joshi 1
Stefania Trabucchi 0

5. Check-ins

Congratulations to Gabriel, Kyle and Andres for crossing the 100 hours mark!

Gabriel D’Amours 150
Kyle McCormick 112.25
Andrés González 197

All the raw details and extra information can be found here: Core Contributors - Sprint Planning & Retro - Google Sheets

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@Dean Thank you for the recap! :+1:

Follow-up from previous sprints

A follow-up on the topic of improving PR descriptions discussed at the Contributors meetup: this PR has been merged to move towards better descriptions on PRs:

Sprint’s checkins discussions

@kmccormick During the contributors meetup, @arbrandes indicated that this is caused by the current design, and that there are discussions on unifying dependencies, but there isn’t a clear answer yet. @ghassan has suggested and volunteered to do a discovery on this, and has a proof of concept that he will publish.

@pdpinch On this @dave offered to discuss with you. He has also provided a quick explanation of what CourseOutlines and CourseOverviews during the contributors meetup – it should be towards the end of yesterday’s recording (last 10-15 minutes) which will be published by @jalondonot at Open edX Contributors Meetup - #105 by jalondonot and Contributor's Meetup 2022-07-26 · Issue #69 · openedx/wg-coordination · GitHub in the coming days.

Definitely have a look at the TOC election draft! These are important discussions, which will impact the direction of the project.

Also worth looking at these two other collaboration & governance topics, which need feedback:

@mgmdi and @sarina will be discussing the plans for the onboarding courses.

For these three, there seem to be a common thread: the need to better support larger or more custom instances of Open edX, when they differ from the main Tutor use case. This is also something which we run into during the Kubernetes collaboration discussion. CC @kylesinlynn @pdpinch @Andres.Aulasneo @regis

@jill As long as the average number of hours matches the commitments and there is no deficit build up, I think we have generally agreed that it’s fine to have variations of availability over time – ie you can do more one month, and then less the next month. Some of the work might be guided by more specific requirements, for example with dealing with production/master issues, or the maintenance/upgrade of specific code bases, as maintainers.

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First I want to cleaify that are two issues that are related but are different.

  • Peer depedecny issue: there are peer depednecy in some MFEs hence PR mentioned and this in accont MFE. This might or might be realted to have a consistent dependcies in MFEs. i.e. we might a consistant wrong version of library in all MFEs.
  • Secondly having a consitant versions for shared libraires is an issue which I initailly started to research how to resolve because I wanted to create a monorepo version of common MFEs Why I wanted to create a monorepo, you can see the repo link below also relevant disccusion here.

Expirement repo is GitHub - ghassanmas/mfes-mono , I have added as much information as possible in Readme.md

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I’d like to understand why the various frontend packages…

I didn’t actually write this, but I have been wondering the same thing so I’m glad someone brought it up. Thanks for sharing mfes-mono @ghassan , I am interested to hear what you learn.

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Ups, sorry! @Dean was that a bug in the data you received? If so we should report the bug to the listaflow project & @Fox_Piacenti .