Open edX Contributors Meetup

Working Groups Contributor Coordination
74

This is the recap from the meeting on 2021-11-02.

First of all, apologies to all for the delayed recap and shared recording. I was sick, unfortunately, for the past 2 weeks and I had trouble coordinating with someone to share them instead.

Topics discussed

Working groups

  • Marketing — 00:02:23

    There were no updates.

    A question was asked about the date set for the Open edX Virtual Event in December, which is disclosed below.

    There were also discussions about asking working groups to provide their updates asynchronously so the updates don’t have to be given by a specific representative.

  • Release — 00:05:59

    maple.beta1 has been branched :partying_face: It’s also ready to be tested with Tutor, so if it’s something you’re interested in, you should jump right in!

    The lilac.3 open-release has also been tagged. You’re encouraged to upgrade your lilac instances :smiley:

  • Frontend — 00:07:10

    Some progress is being done on the Node 16 upgrade. Some additional effort is being put towards sharing more UI related tasks with the community, so others can have the chance to get involved.

    The learning MFE is one of the many MFEs who has its header hard coded into it, which makes it not customizable or theme-able. There’s already a mechanism that uses the headers as frontend components; however, some MFEs aren’t using it. However, work is being done on that front so that the header can be customized in the learning MFE.

    More information can be found on " FWG Meetup 2021-11-09".

  • Core Contributors — 00:09:17

    Work is being done to get a UX Core Contributor. Someone also showed interest in being a Product Core Contributor, so there are some follow-ups regarding that.

    More committers are sought after, at the moment.

  • Data — 00:10:48

    The data working group’s work will be available on GitHub’s beta projects.

    The first priority is looking into the issue with ElasticSearch vs OpenSearch. In order to help the edX team, the working group will provide recommendations.

Events

  • Open edX Virtual Event in December - 00:02:43

    On Tuesday December the 14th, an Open edX Virtual Event will be held on Gather. There is no official announcement yet.

Projects

  • Core Contributors Sprints — 00:12:58

    There were previous discussions, in the past, regarding better tracking the work done on the core contributor front.

    There are discussions happening on the github issue, which members are welcome to contribute to.

    At the moment, great things are being done, but many core contributors aren’t aware of each others work because of the increasing number of core contributors.

    The suggestion, at the moment, is to create a 2 week sprint with synchronous meetings where core contributors can share their updates. The updates would be shared in two different synchronous meetings, so members can join the one which is more appropriate with their timezone.

    Another suggestion would be having a 15 minute meetup every month, on two different sides of the world, so members can share a statement of what they are working on with others.

    In order to have a better idea regarding the opinions of core contributors on the matter, @antoviaque will be reaching out to further coordinate the discussion.

    There is a wide range of core contributors, which created a concern regarding the amount of different projects which would be covered. However, identifying the different range of projects would facilitate finding other core contributors who can help, whenever needed, according to @sarina. This would allow core contributors to have a larger impact where they can help and when necessary.

    There are also suggestions to use the community meetup to share the updates because a large number of the core contributors are available during that meeting. In addition, a large portion of the projects being worked on are being discussed in that meeting.

    For the latest updates on the discussion, it’s best to follow-up on its github issue.

  • Leaderboard — 00:21:34

    Not much time can be dedicated towards it at the moment. It seems like the approach, for now, is to hold off on any work or discussions related to the leaderboard, until the future of the project is clear.

  • edX Brandings Backlog — 00:24:30

    The construction of a backlog which collects any edX branding and/or business logic which should be moved to plugins or removed from them is being suggested by @e0d.

    If you know where such things exist, please be sure to share them with @e0d, possibly over Discourse messages or Slack, to help contribute in the preparation of the backlog.

    In addition, @nedbat has plans to remove statements which direct users to contact edX support from the Open edX platform.

    Side note: if you can suggest a better name for this project, please share your ideas. I don’t believe mine is accurate.

  • Upgrades

    • Django 3.2 upgrade — 00:30:16

      There are some slight additional dependencies which need to be addressed on the Django 3.2 board.

      However, this project has been considered to be complete in the meetup, so it won’t be discussed in future updates.

      From a community perspective, there are interests in knowing how many issues where tackled by people outside of edX.

    • Node.js 16 — 00:33:33

      At the moment, work is being done to identify what breaks and changes with the Node upgrade.

      In addition, the node package manager (npm) needs to be upgraded as well. In hopes of resolving the issues with npm, there are prospects to utilize the node version manager (nvm) to specify an npm version to use with the Open edX repositories.

      The work is still in early discovery stages, at the moment.

  • Django Backend APIs: Django Signal Events, Django Filters — 00:35:56

    Some internal work is being done to apply the decisions taken in the ADRs regarding Django Filters in the implementation.

    Once the implementation is ready, it would be shared with the community to retrieve some feedback.

  • xAPI/Caliper, OEP-26 — 00:37:26

    A major version of the library was released where the xAPI transformers were refined. Router configuration was made easier, in addition to the improvements in the documentation.

    At the moment, the library works for Maple, only. At the moment, there are no plans to backport the library to the previous named releases, because there hasn’t been much demand regarding previous named releases.

    If you’d like to utilize the xAPI/Caliper implementation, you’ll want to upgrade to the Maple release.

  • MySQL instead of MongoDB — 00:42:16

    An initial pull request was created, which then had to be reverted and broken down into 3 pieces to provide casual roll-outs.

    The largest pull request has been merged into master. However, it will be reverted for Maple so that the changes can be extensively tested by the edX team before queuing up the change for the Nutmeg release.

    Any additional pull requests merged related to utilizing MySQL instead of MongoDB won’t be included in the Maple release, to avoid confusion.

    This change does not target MongoDB for the forum, but only the Open edX platform, as mentioned in @dave’s ADR.

  • DEPR impediments - any tickets that need real-time discussion? — 00:53:01

Video Recording

The chat log can be found on the meeting’s agenda.

Participants

@Andres.Aulasneo
@antoviaque
@BbrSofiane
@dave
@djoy
@e0d
@Felipe
@ghassan
@idegtiarov
@nedbat
@nizar
@pdpinch
@regis
@sarina
@Zia_Fazal

Next meetup

Tuesday November 16th at 15:00 UTC (Timezone converter).

Details and draft agenda on the Github board.

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