Core Contributors Sprints

Working Groups Core Contributors
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I have only been a Core Contributor for a couple of weeks, so haven’t done much at all! I’ve had a few discussions with Sarina Canelake, Ed Zarecor, Xavier, and Mike Leary about my role and what I should be working on, but it’s still not completely clear. I have another meeting with Mike Leary tomorrow where we’re hoping to nail down where I’ll be most useful.

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Past projects:

In progress:

Current blockers: we need more eyeballs to try out the Maple release in order to detect issues early.

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Thank you @antoviaque for your efforts and sorry for the delayed comment.
Below I will list the topics and tasks my team (Abstract Technology GmbH), among others Nicole Kessler, Marco Chiruzzi, Everton Zanella and I have been working on the last weeks and months and will continue to work on:

  • Marketing Working Group:
    We attend the meetings in a bi-weekly cadence. There are different Tasks in the loop as for example the improvement of the Open edX Marketplace, an Open edX competitors matrix, and Pamphlets for the USP of the Open edX platform.
    • Blockers: Since the marketing activities always require checks from the legal department or design issues need to be approved, progress is sometimes slow. Probably we should try to establish a more asynchronous working method.
  • Transifex Working Group:
    We attend the meetings in a bi-weekly cadence. We are actively working on translating existing strings in Transifex in German, Italian and Spanish (EU).
    • Blockers: None
  • In-Video Quiz XBlock:
    We are maintainer of this XBlock since autumn 2021.
    • Blockers: We need to get access to the Repo and to the Community Engineering Team (we asked Edward Zarecor in beginning of October 2021 and still did not receive access). Probably things and processes were slowed down due to the acquisition and the Maple release. But could anybody grant access to us?
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Thanks for the ping! Here’s my update, which will be quite similar to Stefania’s:

Past work

  • Marketing working group (bi-weekly meeting): iterations of improvement of the Open edX website and providers marketplace, work on preferred provider program, review of extensions directory, community members video introductions, collaborative blog posts

In Progress

  • Marketing working group: providers marketplace UI and filters
  • Transifex group: reviewing translations fro FR-CA

Planned work

  • Transifex group: reviewing translations for FR-CA
  • Marketing working group: finishing providers marketplace UI and filtering, rest TBD after acquisition process (website revamp likely coming)

Blockers

Legal reviews and the 2U acquisition process are slowing things down a little, but not blockers per se.

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Past work:

Current work:

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Here is my quick update

Work in recent months:
-Help moving forward the agenda of the Marketing Working Group.
-Prepare and deliver a talk for the last online event
-Performing translations and reviews for language es_419
-Prepare and deliver a workshop on transifex for the open edX platform

Planned work (for the last weeks of 2021):
-catch up on the latest untranslated/unreviewed strings for edx platform, mobile apps and xblocks for es_419
-make a review of DeepL and alternative tools to automate to some extent the translations efforts and present the findings to the group on the 22nd.

Blockers: None

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Happy to give an update, @antoviaque

What I’ve been working on: Cleaning up the legal ends of the CC program (agreements & updated Declaration of Commitment); making sure working groups have what they need / helping get DEPR off the ground; writing some blog posts to advertise Maple (will share for comment once drafts are complete); edX/tCRIL focused items related to the “decoupling” of edX and the nonprofit.

What I’m up to next: @abstract-technology please reach out to me on Slack and I’ll help you with what you need; @ali_hugo similarly I’d love to chat with you on Slack around where your efforts are going and how I can help. Writing an OEP for Core Contributors (get things more formalized than a wiki page) and codify who and how we moderate and administer this forum.

Blockers: none so far! but I want to help with yours, so always feel free to reach out.

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Nearest past work

In progress:

Plans:

To allocate more time for:

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Past work

Planned work
I’ll be available only for a half of the next sprint, so I’m planning to review these PRs:

Blockers
No blockers at the moment.

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Hi all!

One quick note from inside edX/2U-land: We have our first internal all-hands engineering meeting with the rest of the 2U engineering organization on Friday at 9am in the exact same time slot as the sprint planning meeting. :weary:

I feel compelled to attend that so that I can learn more about the rest of the org and start understanding how we (edX and the rest of the Open edX community!) will start interacting with them as the companies start working together.

That said and double-booking aside, I dig what I’m hearing in this thread, and reading everyone’s updates is a great reminder of all the awesome work happening out there. It’s important to note all that and celebrate it! Practically speaking I’m not sure what capacity I’ll be able to participate in the sprint, but would like to stay involved and informed to see where I might be able to help.

I’ll note that the Frontend Working Group has a pretty full backlog which hasn’t quite been groomed into an approachable, parallelizable set of tasks, unfortunately. Most of it doesn’t feel directly applicable to/blocking of the release of Maple, so for the purposes of this sprint I think we can ignore it as a source of possible tasks.

For my part, I feel like I have a bunch of irons in the fire at the moment:

  • Shepherding along our node 16 and npm 8 upgrade, working on IE 11 deprecation, and eslint 8 upgrade, which are all related, sadly.
  • OEP for Micro-frontend customization
  • OEP for Micro-frontend plugins, implementation of iframe-based plugins in frontend-platform
  • Helping to define the problem space for improvements to our developer experience. This includes developer onboarding, product alignment and process, risk mitigation around edx.org deploys as our project’s topography starts shifting, and long-term decoupling and modularity of edx-platform. This is just getting started.
  • Reviewing PRs for moving the Learning MFE header into frontend-component-header
  • Trying to be a resource for BTR where possible.

Something like that, anyway. Not all of it can get brain space at the same time.

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Past projects

  • Django 3.2 Upgrade

In progress

Current blockers

  • The BTR group needs more people from the community testing Maple so we can spot issues quickly
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Past projects

  • BTR chair for the Lilac release cycle
  • OEP 45, ADR 1
  • Small fixes and code reviews

In progress

Not much. I’m going through a transition period, and have had other priorities for the past few weeks.

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Hi everyone!

I just recently became Core Contributor and am still onboarding, getting familiar with the processes, and trying to organize my time for future sprints.

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Thanks for the updates! :smiley:

For maple @BbrSofiane do we have assignees for all the blockers for the maple release which needed help, currently? If not, given how important this is for the project, it would be worth considering switching some of the work we planned for this month?

@djoy @nedbat Sorry about the conflict :frowning: Given the number of people who needed to attend, I had to go with the majority’s availability on the choice of slot, but hopefully on the next meeting the conflict won’t be there? It’s important to be able to involve both of you in this I think (and other upcoming core contributors at edX, maybe? :slight_smile: ) – so let me know if that will still be really blocking, we can try again to find another slot for the next meetings.

For Jan 4 vs Jan 11 – both look fine. Personally I’ll be off on Jan 11, so I would personally prefer Jan 4th, but I see how more people are likely to be off on Jan 4th. So no objection on my side either way.

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Here is my update:

Previous work

  • Open edX hooks framework (events and filters)
  • Doc-a-thon reviewing and merging
  • Python 3 update
  • Django 3.2 upgrades
  • Overall bringing the technical team at eduNEXT closer to the community
  • Arbiter of OEP-45

Work I expect to push forward during the remaining of the year

  • Getting filters over the line to master
  • Investigating and solving issues for ecommerce in the Maple release
  • Participating in the contributors regular meeting

Blockers

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One thing I’ll add here is that I got involved with the project back when @Felipe first put up the proposal, because I believe that it’s a critical capability for the platform to have. I’ve tried to review PRs like these from my perspective as someone who’s dealt with operational and long term maintenance issues. But as I’ve repeatedly noted in various places, I am not the target audience for this API. I think that this group is especially well qualified to review the work happening with events and filters in general, and that you might find a lot of value from doing so.

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Here is a proposed agenda for the planning meeting tomorrow - this is a draft (like everything else), so don’t hesitate if you see things to change:

Agenda

1) Introductions

  • 2-3 sentences to introduce ourselves

  • Answer a question: “What made you make your first contribution to Open edX?”

2) Priority tasks

  • Review boards & tickets blocking the maple release (CC @BbrSofiane @regis )

  • Find assignees for each of them

3) Sprint updates

  • What did we do recently as core contributor?

  • What will we do during the upcoming sprint?

  • Any blocker?

4) Retrospective

  • What went well so far?

  • What can we improve?

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Since I won’t be joining the sprint later today, I thought I’d add a quick summary here.

What did we do recently as core contributor?
I met with Mike Leary from Open edX to discuss my role (I’m going to send a follow up on the Core Contributor epic as there are still a lot of unknowns. Xavier, I’ll @ you there).

What will we do during the upcoming sprint?
Go on holiday! I’ll be back early January to meet with Mike (again) to decide which projects I should work on. Hopefully this time we can figure it out and I can start putting my hours to good use! :muscle:

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Thank you for a productive meeting on Friday! Here is the recording & chat log.

For the next meetings, we’ll hold them every two weeks at the same time (Friday @ 2pm UTC). I’ll update the meeting invite to make it recurring – given the number of people involved, it would be important to prioritize it in case of conflicts, as they are really hard to reschedule.

That said, with the coming holidays:

  • For the meeting to end the current sprint next week, since the meeting would end up on Christmas eve (Dec 24th), we are going to try to have it earlier in the week next week. Please fill this poll by tomorrow Tuesday Dec 14th at the end of the day. Thanks! (The results will be available there.)

  • Since the next two weeks are Christmas/New Year, we won’t try to plan a sprint there – only debrief the results current sprint, and do a retrospective. The next sprint will be planned on the following sprint planning meeting, on January 7th (also at 2pm UTC).

NB: I’ll be off on January 7th, so is there someone who would be willing to handle the sprint planning meeting that day?

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And also posting a screenshot of the meeting recording that I linked to above – it was really nice to be together in the same (virtual) room like this! :slight_smile:

Screenshot from 2021-12-13 15-36-34

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