Frontend Working Group Recap 2022-07-07

Working Groups Frontend
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FWG recap 2022-06-22

This is a recap from the latest FWG meetings:

Videos and chat logs can be found at the issue descriptions above.

TLDW

First off, apologies for the long delay in getting to this recap. Because of it, I’m sticking to the most important highlights since the last one.

Also, I’ll now post a new thread per recap: this will help with visibility, a little.

Conference catch-up

Let me start with the best part: the conference! A lot has been said about how great it was (and indeed, it was!), but I’m particularly proud of the fact that as far as the frontend is concerned, it resulted in actual work being done do address one of the community’s main concerns: dynamic MFE configuration. The work, taken up by eduNext, is yet in progress but we’re hoping to be able to backport it safely to Nutmeg.

You can also watch the State of the Frontend talk for a more general overview of where we stand.

A new frontend maintenance squad

Thanks to @jmbowman there is now a new “FED-BOM” team, funded by 2U, specifically tasked with maintenance of MFEs and other frontend code. They are: Muhammad Waheed, Bilal Qamar, and Maman Khan. They’re quickly ramping up on contributions, already doing very useful work.

Frontend triage team

In order to better handle the incoming PR review workload, we created a frontend-triage Github team. The idea is simple: when unsure who to ask for a frontend-related review, ask @frontend-triage. It is, for now, composed of @AdamStankiewicz, @Ben_Warzeski, @djoy and myself, and we’ll do our best to either review the incoming PRs or find reviewers for them.

An alternate meeting time

As annound in another thread, we’re now holding one frontend working group meeting per week, with alternating times: one happens at 15:00 UTC, the other at 11:00 UTC. This is so that community members further east can chat synchronously at a more comfortable time. Find the one that works better for you, and join us!

Work complete

I’m glad to report that the following work has been completed since the last recap:

Work in progress

Dynamic theming

I’m particularly excited to report that @kshitij at OpenCraft is actively working two ADRs related to dynamic theming:

• SCSS to CSS variables
• A common stylesheet for MFEs

These are just the first steps in getting a theming engine that works across MFEs, but I encourage folks to take a look and comment.

Update on the roadmap

Me and @jmakowski are actively working on producing a proper Open edX Frontend Roadmap. We hope to have a draft to take up with the Product Working Group soon: the idea is to use it as one of the first use cases where that group makes practical decisions that have a product impact.

That’s not all the roadmap will be useful for, though. Among many other things (visibility, planning, etc), one important use case is to track what work is happening, in order to avoid duplication. With that in mind, we’ll soon ask community members to report on work they’re currently doing on the frontend, so it can be made a part of the roadmap.

This is the issue where we’re tracking this stage of the work: MFE priority list - add product value and impact info · Issue #354 · openedx/tcril-engineering · GitHub

Participants

The following were present at one or more of the meetings referred to in this recap:

Next meetings

The next 11:00 UTC meeting will be held on Thursday, July 14th (Timezone converter). The draft agenda can be found on #112 on the board.

The next 15:00 UTC meeting will be held one week later, also on Thursday (Timezone converter). The draft agenda can be found on #113.

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