Meeting Expectations
Why?
Who?
What?
At times, these informal discussions result in follow-up action and beneficial change in our technology or in our organization. While this is not a decision-making body, these serendipitous discussions spark ideas that may result in ADRs/OEPs and tickets on team backlogs.
At times, it serves as a form of informal office hours to ask live technical questions of the archeological collective.
At times, we have pre-planned deep-dive topics that folks propose to gather wide-input or to answer questions.
At times, we have hosted special guests (internal and external to edX) on specialized topics.
When?
How? Live Co-Editing
To circumvent Confluence’s limitations with the maximum number of concurrent editors:
Why not just stick with keeping the notes in the Google doc?
Google docs are not as discoverable.
Google docs don’t notify observers of future edits.
Google doc comments don’t notify all observers.
How? Structure
Please enter your proposed topics for discussion.
When we use Lean Coffee Style (link1, link2), we vote on which topics the group wants to discuss and time-box the discussion to 10 or 15mns → 5mns (if re-voted) → 5mns (if re-voted).
notePrefix your topic with your intention so we are clear on what outcome you are striving from the discussion. Examples:
[inform] You are simply seeking to inform the group of this item. You may field clarifying questions from the group on your inform, but not seeking further discussion at this time.
[ideation] You are seeking divergent and wide perspectives from this group. In this brainstorming mode, all ideas are accepted, without critical analysis.
[analysis] You are asking the group to help you poke holes in your idea/topic/plan/etc.
[quest] You are seeking information/responses to a question you have.
Prefix your topic with your intention so we are clear on what outcome you are striving from the discussion. Examples:
[inform] You are simply seeking to inform the group of this item. You may field clarifying questions from the group on your inform, but not seeking further discussion at this time.
[ideation] You are seeking divergent and wide perspectives from this group. In this brainstorming mode, all ideas are accepted, without critical analysis.
[analysis] You are asking the group to help you poke holes in your idea/topic/plan/etc.
[quest] You are seeking information/responses to a question you have.
2021-12-22
[ideation] (David J) What do we need to change in Tutor to make it minimally useful for edX developers to start using?
[quest] (David J) What is paver used for today? Corollary, what is paver?
Paver is a python library for creating tasks to be executed from the command line
Runs unit tests, building static assets, maintenance tasks, in edx-platform. Never got used anywhere else.
Still technically maintained. Started moving away from it and running the underlying commands directly.
We did not build paver.
Chain of thought: we need a task runner, make files are default, messy and shell based, want to do something in python, lets use paver. Wait, this is complicated, lets go back to using Makefiles.
Makefiles and paver give you a way of saying "this command needs these other commands first"
Django management commands don't do that.
The appeal was complex dependent-task management ("Only run this thing once even if several commands need it")
Problem with Make: needs to be implemented as shell scripts
Paver lets you use python files instead of shell scripts.
When the project was first starting out, we wanted anyone to be able to run it anywhere. A lot of initial goodwill - as the reality of that set in, we decided supporting windows is hard and not valuable for the amount of investment we'd have to do to keep it working. Usage of paver stemmed out of that, but then getting back out became too big for any team to take on.
[quest] Enterprise team is looking to best leverage feature toggles abilities to do more flexible (per customer or per subscription) toggles of features.A lot of these are done via config models right now. I wanted to get a base understanding of what best practices are in this area (edx-toggles read gave me words like: Waffle, Django setting, SettingToggle). Also, want to brainstorm on how can frontends best leverage these settings? Prior art? link to edx-toggles
2021-12-01
[quest/ideation] (Diana) - Devstack data project - who has a good use case that we should tackle?
Have a prototype that will load data into devstack
Arch-BOM were hunting around for a team with a good use case
Reach out to #arch-bom if you have a use case
[Ideation] (Justin Lapierre) How to set up a course/configuration in Devstack for QA in a reliable, reproducible way
[ideation] (David J) As the balance of edX devs to core contributors shifts in the future, how do we think that affects the risk profile of our CI/CD pipelines deploying off of master, and what might need to change? :eyes:
"Support not changing things until there's a problem"
We may not be the only people deploying from master - what if _we_ break someone else's systems?
SWG perspective - how do we do security releases reliably?
How do we know we're in a more risky situation?
"Eventual trouble is probably inevitable", we don't know what the problem will be, but we may be able to game out how we might deal with the problem. There's no code change we can't roll back (putting aside malicious stuff) Data migrations are scary because they can be 100% destructive and irreversible. And/or wildly unperformant.
Does GitHub have a canonical solution to what edx-platform-private solves today?
Idea: "migration files require an extra approval" via CODEOWNERS
[inform] (Adam B) - Spreading this info more widely: If you want to add users with granular permissions to ecommerce you can now do so through app-permissions, e.g. like this
[ideation/analysis] (David J) In spirit, over time edX employees could be thought of as core contributors themselves. The CC program has a time commitment (20 hrs/month). Could edX engineers/others be CCs? What would that look like for product delivery teams?
Ecommerce collaborative push?
Can we borrow from other communities?
Flywheel to support community which then helps us
We focused on drag, but what about focusing on benefit?
What features does edX/2U want?
Goal: Reducing ambiguity around expectations
Can we be a bit more formal around finding what folks are interested in and hooking them up with the right WG/people?
2021-11-24
[analysis] (Nathan Sprenkle) Internally-routed XBlock handler calls
[Ned] Meta-question: are there any more questions or discussion following on from the Eng All-Hands?
[question] (Jeremy) If you could nominate 1-2 things to improve the experience for new Open edX developers, what would they be? (We’ll likely have many such people soon.)
[dkh] We should pick up the thread of the onboarding work Feanil recently did
[djoy] Better/updated seed data for freshly provisioned devstacks/services
[djoy] push button environment creation and simple installation/setup instructions and documentation
[adam] Make things more consistent (devstack vs sandboxes vs prod, bokchoy vs cypress)
[andy] tests that work outside of a devstack shell
[andy] devstack as cattle not as pet
[andy] meta improvement: measure time lost to devstack to motivate investment
[djoy] is there a third party libraries-so-popular-they're-standards development environment stack that we could adopt so that someone else maintains our development stack for us, effectively. (this is clearly not a small thing)
[Ned] Can TCRIL participate here?
[Adam] question: Is there anything stopping us from moving https://build.testeng.edx.org/job/edx-e2e-tests/ to the new tools-automation cluster?
2021-11-03
++[analysis] (Dave O): Extracting a low-level learning core out of edx-platform and into a new repo.
(Original post/thread).
Motivation:
Create a smaller/simpler dependency to build extensions on top of (instead of edx-platform). This means smaller, more stable APIs that can add incremental value, instead of the backloaded benefits of removing stuff from edx-platform.
Promote innovation by making it easier to create different experiences on top of Open edX (like LabXchange).
Advance the Studio/LMS split (these would be the core of the LMS).
Some potential apps: publishing, navigation, policy, composition (what’s in a Unit for this user?), scheduling, partitioning (what users are in what groups for various tests).
Strategy for dealing with tricky extractions: Core data models and frameworks exist in new repo. Plugins are implemented in edx-platform. Examples:
For navigation, an outline processor framework exist in new repo, but an EnrollmentOutlineProcessor exists in edx-platform, keeping knowledge of enrollments out of the new core.
For partitioning, the data models to store user/partition mappings live in the new core, but actual partition bucketing logic remains implemented in edx-platform.
Strategy for data migration: Start with content data, that can be rebuilt/backfilled from Modulestore. We do this kind of thing all the time already.
Feedback:
Robert: In general, like the idea. Where to start: serving particular needs, like course overview-like data, verify that it serves the needs. Interfaces vs. implementations: do we need both? E.g. for course overviews, does it just need to move or will work need to be done–define an interface for a mocked version?
Jeremy: Any idea of things currently installed in edx-platform that directly call edx-platform–what are they doing?
Jeremy: might it be worth identifying APIs in edx-platform that are the main code called by many other parts of the platform, so extracting it could allow all those to also be extracted?
There may be some cases where we move enough of the core of such an app (models, etc.) to a separate repo, but leave all the tangled implementation details in place to minimize the up-front work needed.
+ [quest] (Jeremy) Docker Desktop changes - how does this influence build vs. buy decisions?
Docker is starting to charge for Docker Desktop usage for orgs like ours
There are possible alternatives like Minikube, but we haven’t really evaluated how well they would work for us
Quite possibly worth edX paying for this, not as clear for Open edX at large
Jeremy discussed this with Régis; we agreed it needs to be discussed/resolved, but didn’t come up with any immediate answers
BTR working group at large hasn’t discussed this yet
Does moving to Codespaces or something similar change this
Costs ~$21/user/month for 50+ user orgs
Open edX will probably support multiple options in the future, but edX is likely to pick a default for its own developers
Probably just paying the license fee for now, to free up resources for acquisition-related stuff
Has anyone tried Tutor or Codespaces?
Tutor: https://docs.tutor.overhang.io/run.html , written by Régis Behmo
Codespaces, etc.: sounds cool, nobody’s had time to look at it very closely
Quicker to get started (and to restart!)
Internet speed: are codespaces better or worse than downloading docker images for poor internet speed?
Doesn’t work at all offline, but that may not really be an issue for most people these days
2021-10-06
[discuss] [Jeremy] mypy: where are we, where are we going
We’re running this for edx-platform in an optional GitHub Action check
We don’t have many annotations yet
There are tools that would let us add a lot pretty quickly by analyzing our test suite, etc.
Feanil is somewhat excited about this as a way to catch potential problems early
Available for people who are excited about it, but any broader push for adoption will wait for at least a couple of months for other projects to settle down
It’s a tool to enforce best practices on interfaces, but we haven’t necessarily declared such best practices yet
If you find a good starting guide, consider adding to Learning Resources
[quest](Feanil) What are people’s expectations of arch-hour?
Awkward silence
Updates on what other people are concerned about or coming down the pipeline
Figure out how architecture is handled at edX
Cross-team interaction
Insights into engineering task prioritization
Feedback on what architectural challenges people are facing
[quick question (hopefully)]: Is anyone familiar with the QTI spec? As in worked with it enough for me to ask some questions regarding structure/capabilities?
[inform] (Dave O) https://github.com/fanout/django-grip looks like a potentially useful alternative to channels
[question] (Jeremy B) Does anybody feel it’s worth investigating Django alternatives like FastAPI yet?
[discuss] (Dave O) Possible next steps to resolve database performance issues
It’s hard to optimize this locally without awareness of the overall context of a given request
We may need to more often create custom APIs rather than extending existing ones with new (possibly performance impacting) data
Monitoring is key, especially to catch regressions
People don’t have a good sense on thresholds for action required to improve performance
2021-09-01
++++[ideation] (Jeremy) How should we handle dependencies that are little used/maintained by others? Should we be more actively attempting to switch to alternatives or remove usage?
(djoy) What happened to the idea of having a comprehensive index of the packages we rely on, their licenses, etc? I recall we had a push to figure that out a while back.
(nim) There is a tradeoff today since owning teams are not feeling the pains of managing and upgrading their dependencies. There’s an opportunity to surface this back to the teams or find a better way to help teams be accountable.
+++[quest] (djoy) Curious about any updates on the hooks extension framework, event bus, splitting LMS and studio, etc. Things happening!?
Hooks - API for Django App Backend Plugins
Building on top of Django Signals
Focused on providing APIs for backend plugins
Targeting completion before Maple is released
Recent PR in edx-platform to be reviewed adds initial events that follow this pattern
Frontend Plugin Framework
Initial focus - iFrame-based plugins in MFEs
Next step
Find a use case: Could be Discussions in Learning MFE
How does this dovetail with LTI?
How do we define and document a plugin API?
Starting with a fundamental requirement of having a security sandbox around plugins - this means iframes.
Explored plugins via module federation
Proved complex
Impossible to put a sandbox around the code.
For plugins specifically, doesn’t have many uses that iframe plugins can’t support
Event Bus - Inter-service Communications
Working on POC
Draft OEP in progress
Robert, ChrisP, and Feanil as mini-team on this.
Is there any database-level replication work happening as part of the proof-of-concept?
What’s an initial use case the POC may look at?
What are the use cases the POC is trying to solve?
Note: #event-bus slack channel recently created.
xAPI/Caliper
Boundaries
++[ned] wiki space ownership? Good idea, or great idea?
2021-07-28
(5) ***** (discuss) [Dave O] Iframes, Chrome 92, and what we’re going to do about it.
Interim solution for half a year, then will permanently break
potential solutions include getting react more usable in our iframe applications, and custom-build the things we are trying to access from outside the iframe (ORA is running into Pothis because we use window.confirm)
Need to backport the temp fix to Lilac?
Known Issues
ORA runs into this in `window.confirm`
LTI launch, open-in-new-window
Probably custom instructor code in various courses
Decision point: double-down on iFrames OR pivot to another way to embed JS components
Perspective: Google Chrome’s move is aligned with making iFrame technology more secure, which we can read as a signal that the industry will continue to advance in the direction of iFrames
Opportunity to seek further input
Embracing iFrames in our platform today
Learner MFE
LTI Plugins
Experience Plugins (XPs)
Next steps
(4) **** (discuss) [Ben W] Implications of community engagement performance requirement on arch topics/work?
In other words, “Are there things currently not being covered by a working group that COULD be, in order to better make use of this org move?”
Frontend engineering working group formation starting up - with BenW, DavidJ, AdamS, and Nim - to tackle frontend technical direction and tasks.
Potential groups:
Today’s Engineering Groups
* DEPR (internal -> become inclusive)
RCAs (internal)
eSRE (internal)
** Security WG (internal)
Built-Test-Release WG (making Open edX Named Releases efficient and effective)
** FedX Working Group (internal -> becoming inclusive)
Today’s other (non-engineering) groups
ACTION ITEMS
Ned Batchelder Add this to the Doc Hackathon Ideas sheet - to formulate WG charter, etc. [Ned]
Publicize wider (maybe in slack) for i18n, Documentation
Nimisha Asthagiri Add as agenda to reconnect on status in future Arch Hour
David Joy (collaborators?) - Spruce up our working group page - to update status, expectations, ideas, etc.
(4) **** (discuss)[Ned, Usama] We seem to have two ways to use common-constraints.txt (copy into repo, or don’t). Is there common understanding about what to do?
Found the reason for it. Updating Django constraint on local was conflicting with the Django2.3 global constraint due to new pip-tools constraint that raises errors if there are multiple constraints instead of overwriting the previous constraint.
Tested the approach to pull common_constraint on local, remove django constraint from it and update constraint locally: https://github.com/edx/openedxstats/pull/107 .
Now, deciding whether to drop the common django constraint and only have a local django constraint in all the packages and services?
2021-07-14
(7) ******* [Question, Ned] tags vs GitHub releases to make Python lib releases?
(5) ***** [Quest, BenW] How do we make the case to the organization that Paragon is a valuable thing to be maintained and have stable ownership?
(3) *** [Question, Ned] What prep do people need for the “Doc Love” hackathon?
List of docs that should be written or need updating?
Doc personas?
Docs in confluence: what extensions are available, which might be useful? Get IT approval early.
(2) ** [Ideation, DaveO] Lifting out a subset of edx-platform to make extension development easier.
2021-07-07
(1) *[Inform] Doc hackathon planning is underway. Want to help? (I guess that’s a question)
(Discussed) [inform] (David & Nimisha) Tech Radar Workshop next steps and ongoing work
Radar has been created but needs descriptions and ring placement(trial, adopt, etc).
We’ve categorized (by quadrant) and simplified the blips down to a set which feels correct for our first iteration. The next steps are to write up descriptions for each blip and decide what rings they go into. More on this soon!
(5) ***** [quest] (Matt T): What are the biggest challenges our open source community fights that we can fix before we become the open source community?
(Ned) I’m interested in the emphasis on “become” :)
(Adam Blackwell) In the very niche repo of configuration, community members have to fight to get things added that we don’t use. The general ~2-10 repo month PR flow is write a PR, wait a while for a review, merge it, revert it if it breaks http://edx.org things, then put a new PR with it feature gated, then merge it.
(Adam Blackwell) I’m curious about what http://edx.org specific code is or isn’t in a separate React frontend or Django service
(djoy) Many MFEs have hard coded URLs to edx.org-specific support articles, or i18n strings with edX-specific entities (MicroMasters, http://edx.org , etc.) hard coded into them. We also have places where we’ve coded in particular third party providers that we use that others don’t, such as Cybersource. It’s more a whole laundry list of small things, often.
Nimisha:
[ideation] (Dave O): Would it make sense to see if we can lift out a small, relatively sane subset of edx-platform to make writing extensions easier (and have edx-platform that)? Things like learning_sequences, user partitioning, scheduling in one place?
2021-06-30
(3) *** [inform] (Jeremy) Upgrades in preparation for Maple:
(6) ****** [ideation] (Nim) Documentation strategy - in prep for hackathon and follow-ups from discussion in #institutional_knowledge
(5) ***** [quest] (Kyle) Do we foresee edX being on a “level field” with other community members (OpenCraft, RacoonGang, et al) in terms of Open edX core committer rights? Specifically, do we think edX employees and, say, OpenCraft employees will have the same requirements to become CCs?
Nim: One of the principles from the Core Committer program:
Hold an equal bar for both edX engineers and community engineers, in the long-term. In the future, for instance, edX engineers might earn merge rights just as other contributors to the platform.
Nim: For extensions to the core, owning squads as admins of their own repos, can make autonomous decisions on merge rights.
ACTION : Follow up on the B(oundary) part of BEES.
2021-06-23
[discuss](Brian) Are we taking steps to remove our dependency on MongoDB?
[discuss](Jeremy) Are there any new features people are particularly looking forward to in newer versions of Django/Elasticsearch/Mongo/Node? Or are people generally not keeping up with these release notes?
This seems like a nice thing to keep in a knowledge base style wiki
Dave would like to see some more targeted usage of Python type checking, building on Regis’s mypy work in edx-platform
Jeremy is curious if new-style Django URL configuration would help our regex-related startup performance issues in edx-platform
[discuss](Jeff) How do we want to evolve automated a11y testing?
We last upgraded axe-core 18 months ago
We haven’t updated our set of a11y CI tests in quite a while
Our tools are pretty out of date at this point, there are new ones available
Let’s turn off the a11y tests in Jenkins and GitHub Actions
Jeff will work on new tooling that works for him, and we’ll see if it makes sense to add it to CI
Jeff will create 2 ADRs:
2021-06-16
****[quest] (Jeremy) How painful are these ‘make upgrade’ pull requests? Should they be auto-merged?
Today: they are automatically created, not automatically merged nor deployed.
Similar situation exists for Renovate upgrade PRs for frontend repos (e.g., could be configured to automerge patches).
We should probably auto-merge ones that pass tests
Maybe only during Cambridge working hours?
If you want careful control over a particular dependency’s version, consider keeping a constraint on it
Should have the option to pause automated upgrades during sensitive times (major development project, etc.)]n][bb]
Changelog review is slightly automated, but not as easy as it should be
Maybe an allowlist to control which packages are allowed to be upgraded without review?
Assume SemVer and only auto-merge upgrades of non-major version upgrades?
Should we try to get Renovate to work with our Python dependency management?
***[ideation] (Beggs) How can we build a better experience/automation for UX to validate design work done in PRs and give signoff
Two primary options
Spin up an entire devstack/sandbox environment for MFE PRs
Create mock data for MFEs that can be used to allow the MFE to run without any of its dependencies, then deploy it to S3/Netlify and put a link to the environment on the PR.
The group preferred this option, since it could be done on a case-by-case basis in MFEs that need it, and doesn’t rely on us working through the hard problems of spinning up a “complete” environment on every PR. Deploying an MFE takes 5 minutes, deploying a complete sandbox could take an hour.
** [ideation](Feanil) How can we keep docs up-to-date/evergreen?
Hypothesis: Confluence has a lot of stuff that people are afraid to remove/change because very few people feel like they have sufficient context.
Idea: Extend ownership to confluence?
Should we look again into alternatives to Confluence?
Much of why we use Google Docs is due to limitations in Confluence (concurrent editors, etc.)
We need a custom search widget (which can’t find private pages) partially because Confluence search is terrible
OEP-19 (developer docs) is out of date in some respects; mentions that we use Google Docs, but doesn’t recommend it for anything even though we actually do recommend it for some things
2021-06-02
*** [inform] (David and Nimisha): Tech Radar workshop next Arch Hour on June 9!
*** * [quest] (Jeremy) Upgrade
assistance menu options for squads (for Django 3.2 upgrade, etc.)
We’ll do it ourselves
Do the work, we’ll review the PRs
Do it for us, we don’t need to review the PRs
Other?
resourcing: centralized team versus distributing across teams
Django 3.2 - can take advantage of new ways of doing async
*** [discuss] (ned) should we continue automated “make upgrade” for libraries?
What if the XBlock library doesn’t pin the test requirements in its own library?
Proposal: let XBlock unpin the test requirements; edx-platform will use the latest version when the XBlock is eventually updated in edx-platform.
Note: global constraints file exists
***[discuss] (nim) eventing ADR - versioning, in particular
** [adam bl, ideation] How might we enable continuous deployment 24/7?
2021-05-19
[inform] (Nim/David) Prep for working session(s) at Arch Hour for Tech Radar.
++ [quest] (Jeremy) Has anyone worked with an open source license compliance tool before?
Currently, enhancing repo dashboard in order to answer a few immediate questions
But, looking for long-term solutions
+++ [ideation] (David) More documentation generated from code comments? How much of this do we do today? Are there areas of the code that would benefit from more of it?
+++ [quest] (Nim) Book club on Building Event-driven microservices. - at Arch Hour - every N weeks?
✓✓✓✓✓✓ ✓✔︎
Logistics
Asynchronously - read on your time
Lightning talk style presentation at the top of the hour
Frequency - every other week
Running Doc for notes
Eng-all hands next week - to publicize - Kyle or Nim
Access: Login with MIT email address -> SSO -> access
Starting date June 16th - every other week
[quest] (David) Looking for a facilitator for Monthly Arch Standup still!
+ [quest] (Feanil) A clear journey through our docs. What is the right place to start for a new person?
[ideation] (Feanil) How do we make documentation easier to consume and maintain continuously?
2021-05-12
[Quest] (Ben W) How to ensure good UX and UI processes now that we are merging the functions into Product Designers?
[inform] (Nim/David) Prep for working session(s) at Arch Hour for Tech Radar.
Tracking dependencies of repos over time - Tidelift provides this support.
2021-05-05
[inform/request] (DaveO): I’m working on an ADR to remove modulestore usage from all LMS apps except courseware. If your LMS app needs structural/content data from modulestore to do its job (as opposed to course keys or course config settings), can you please describe your use case?
The performance of modulestore queries can really vary, seems best to just not use it directly whenever possible
[Nim] FYI on Cale’s type-checking PR, which he hoped would eventually help us find callers to Modulestore: https://github.com/edx/edx-platform/pull/26985
++++++ [inform/ideation] (Jeremy): Suggestions/feedback on candidate projects for Arbi-BOM: /wiki/spaces/AT/pages/2689925443
++++[ideation] (djoy) How can we make our developer docs more obviously part of our process? Do people like readthedocs? Is there an amazing alternative out there? Can we make it easier to contribute? To find what you’re looking for? Have you contributed? I haven’t! When you did, why did you do it, and how did you know to?
Readthedocs++, can do markdown, RST, etc.
edx-documentation repo organization is not intuitive to developers
OEPs on developer documentation… still need to get things to match the new pattern
Notes transferred here: Arch Hour Documentation Ideation - 05-05-2021
++++[quest/ideate] ( Awais ) How can we make sandboxes more useful for different services ? ( adding data for ecom, credentials or discovery ).
[Feanil] I think this is a worthwhile investment but there is a question of knowing what to add.
Arch-BOM tried to do this from Dev Data because teams don’t have time to prioritize this work at the moment.
Is there a gap here because the teams with the domain knowledge don’t feel as much pain?
2021-04-28
++ [quest] [Feanil/Jazib] How mature is our k8s stuff, should existing work be moving to it?
+++++++++ [quest] [djoy] What do we think of the idea of non-python backends here at edX?
++++++ [Ned; but I can’t be there until later] How can we use the repo-health information to improve the health of repos? For example: some repos have no openedx.yaml file.
How do we decide which things are most important to make consistent?
Once we’ve decided what to make consistent, how do we do that in the face of competing priorities on specific squads?
How actively is this data being utilized currently?
Is the current presentation of the data working, or do we need a better interface for it?
[Ned] I’m using the csv
Comment: currently very wide (which makes it less approachable)
There have been convos about integrating with Snowflake and neo4j.
Maybe we want pluggable output generators, similar to how we have pluggable check implementations? [Ned: is this over-engineering considering a csv is available?]
Frontend Checks
+++[quest] [Robert/Hassan] How do people feel about using the new annotation tooling to annotate custom attributes? Would you find it useful to have a consolidated doc of their purpose?
2021-04-15
2021-04-09
Arch Hour
Testing continued ++++
2021-03-25
Note from Jeremy: I copied these over from the meeting notes after the meeting finished, but my Zoom connection was unreliable for most of the meeting so I’m not sure all these topics were actually discussed. Please edit if you spot any discrepancies.
(5) ***** [JJ, ideation?] Ideas on how to tell people to deploy their changes to production
Do Continuous Deployment? So push to master will just lead to deployment
Team has resisted this, they would like someone to be actively monitoring when changes go out
Developers not on the owning team don’t really know how to do this monitoring
Make the GoCD pipeline do it
Slack: “Please push your changes to production”
What repos have/don’t have CD enabled?
To my knowledge, none of the MFEs are auto-deployed to production. They are auto-deployed to stage, though. -djoy
It seems like only edxapp and prospectus have CD enabled. But many developers work primarily in these repos, so other deployment patterns can catch them by surprise.
(4) **** [JJ, discussion?] How do people manage/”own” repos that other teams contribute to?
(3) ***[djoy] How can we discover - without scaring off - the people still at the company who understand our legacy frontend code (like, but not at all limited to, comp theming)?
(2) **[Ned; open-ended discussion, no agenda!] Thoughts about Open edX theme?
(2) **[Ned; opinion poll] renaming master branches to main
2021-03-18
(5) ***** [question, Matt T] Are we continuing to support multi-site? If I’m writing new code, should I make it site aware, are we planning on ripping it out, somewhere in between?
Matt is going to kick off the DEPR process for multi-site and see what the community thinks
Note (a single dev in) community is somewhat-actively supporting multi-site; see recent PR in this area
EduNext, which hosts 1000+ sites, doesn’t use SiteConfiguration anymore.
We’d like to move the community off of SiteConfiguration. Have them use EduNext’s design instead: runtime override of Django Settings.
(4) **** [question, Alex D] Do we like isort? (do we dislike it?) I made the following arguments against it in a yet-to-be-merged PR for one of our enterprise repos:
(3) *** [ideation | jinder] For OEP-37 implementation, what kind of data (stuff that goes in the databases) do you create in your local devstack?
Course home, courseware flags
Course w/ verified track
Variety/quantity of test users
Content variety
Ora/Teams
Courses in different states
Cohorts
(2) ** [seeking support | Ben W] More projects requiring paragon to be updated in edx-platform have come up
(2) ** [inform, quest | Ben W] Frontend Security training needs react/MFE/edX-relevant solutions
[inform, quest | Ben W] Need for MFE Experimentation Best Practices Documentation
2021-03-11
**** [ideation, David J] An idea that came out of our platform theme operating review this morning: brainstorming conference talk ideas! Not for me - for us all.
List of potentially interesting conferences
Stuff we do at edX that seems likely to be interesting to other developers:
Celery usage at edX
Migrating to Micro-frontends
Future: using webpack module federation to make a pluggable, extensible platform
Paragon
Dependency management (pip-tools, “make upgrade” tooling, Renovate, etc.)
Major tech upgrade management (Python, Django, MySQL, Ubuntu, etc.)
Maintenance efficiency
A history of the edx-platform repository
Django at scale
Edx.org data analytics environment
How we recently changed data tech stacks/warehouses
Terraform management of Snowflake resources
Stack-o-SQL to DBT
How we deal w/schema changes and PII access in warehouse
Devstack (multi-service local dev environment)
Repo health dashboard
Writing pytest plugins
Writing pylint plugins
ADRs and OEPs
Test data management (once OEP-37 is implemented)
How to write accessible code (a11y friendly)
Comprehensive theming (do’s and don’ts)
Prepping for talks
Can present to a smaller group first.
Repurpose edX forums, like Lightning Talks (or also schedule something for this purpose)
Presenting externally
Blog Posts
Conferences
Boston Meetups
ACTION JE, AD: Propose a How-We-Conference
*[question, JJ] if i want to make a style change to https://github.com/edx/edx-platform/blob/master/lms/templates/dashboard/_dashboard_course_listing.html (which doesn't have an edx.org template afaict, but is used in the course dashboard, which has custom templates + styles in edx-platform, edx-platform/themes/edx.org, and edx-themes/edx.org-next), should i make my .scss changes in:
* [ideation, Nim]https://github.com/edx/open-edx-proposals/issues/173
Context: We’d like to expand the core committer program, scaling to more committers and more repos. Thoughts on classifying repos?
Currently thinking 2 ways:
By domain: authoring, discussions, proctoring, release, marketing
By function: frontend-platform, authentication
Examples of working groups we will and have formed with the community:
Ideas of leveraging community development
Any development-related tools (such as devstack, a11y, verification)
i18n of MFEs
e2e tests - writing new Cypress ones
Authentication
Documentation of systems they know better than we do
Refactoring codebase - may require additional business context
Licenses
2021-03-04
See /wiki/spaces/AC/pages/2369224764 .
2021-02-25
(6) ****** [quest, Ben W] embedding react in platform with externally-built JS projects (without re-designing as MFE/separate pages)
Why do this?
Right now, we run into issues with not tackling updating of pages because they are too large. This would lower the barrier-to-entry to modernizing a chunk of JS in platform, thus enabling progress on rewrite/refactors of old code that would otherwise stagnate
The current process requires getting design involvement to redesign a feature into its own separate page in order to render w/ modern react/Paragon
This seems like it should be theoretically possible, but there’s some discovery to be done to determine how practical it is in this context
Our existing render_react and webpack loader don’t seem to be able to handle this
Upgrading just webpack in edx-platform may give us some better options in this respect
Unclear who the person/team is to take next steps on this
Having the ability to incrementally update portions of “pages” in edx-platform would allow us to continue to chip away at our edx-platform frontend code without having to bite off an entire page anytime we want to change anything.
(5) ***** [analysis, Nim] Using GitHub projects and issues for keeping track of technical roadmap and leveraging the community.
Being considered to facilitate allowing Open edX community to more effectively collaborate on the roadmap
This specific tech choice was suggested as something that people already have access to and are likely to have some familiarity with
May be painful to span Jira and GitHub Projects for existing Jira users
Also would need guidelines on when to use which system
Already using in a limited scope with the community
We don’t yet necessarily have enough experience with GitHub Projects to evaluate it fairly
Anecdote: INCR project - was really hard to onboard folks to JIRA, which negatively impacted INCR.
What do we get out of this?
Hypothesis: greater community engagement
Hypothesis: more interaction between edX and the community
Hypothesis: community helping us with our tech maintenance
Standardized roadmap tool? Example: https://github.com/github/roadmap/projects/1
Pluses and Minuses are listed in this comment: https://github.com/edx/open-edx-proposals/issues/174#issuecomment-763001055
(2) ** [ideation/continued discussion, BenW] API-reference in DOM w/ data-keys for test/experiment accessibility
Have added `data-course-key` as an attribute to buttons on the Prospectus pages
Putting referential-ids on the elements that can then be used for calling JS APIs.
The Cypress docs recommend using such data attributes
Related notes: React Patterns & Examples
2021-02-18
(5) *****[quest, Feanil] Feedback on in-progress development use cases document.
(4) **** [ideation, JJ] Which MFE should the track selection page get moved into?
Context: I’m working on a decision doc on the future of the track selection page https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/RS/pages/2396487925/Track+Selection+Page
Questions between the lines: is this page too small for its own MFE? how bad is working in edx-platform, really? How do we partition MFEs / distribute content between MFEs?
May be similar to prospectus, but Ben doesn’t recommend adding to it
What other pages are in this bounded context?
Program selection
Course dashboard “Things on the edge of a course”
Program Dashboard
It’s not part of the ‘marketing’ site, it’s past that
Where do you come to this from, and where do you go after this? Are either of those an MFE?
Learner ‘onboarding’ into a course
DDD Bouned Contexts for reference: https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/AC/pages/663224968/edX+DDD+Bounded+Contexts
Probably Payments MFE?
(4) ****[quest, chris p] eventing/pulsar, its “coming” i’ve heard, but, can is there more concrete info on how badly/how soon peeps want this? mostly curious and i’ve only heard through the grapevine anything about this
context: ISRE is likely going to be implementing this/has spiked on this in the past from what i understand
Message bus rubric work done last year:
An OEP is forthcoming on this to hash it out more concretely
Are we going to support the option for Open edX installations to use a different message bus?
Not by default, unless there’s demand from the community
But will hash this out in the upcoming OEP on the topic
There doesn’t seem to be a lot of overlap in common functionality between the different options in this space
We’re opinionated with respect to other service choices: MySQL, MongoDB, Elasticsearch
Maybe this is different because AWS, etc. don’t have easy-to-manage hosted Pulsar offerings yet?
Arch will contact SRE shortly to officially ask for a Pulsar instance to be set up, to give some time before we need it for the prototype
[Ideation, Feanil] How can we capture useful edx-internal decisions.
2021-02-04
Nimisha Asthagiri (Deactivated) Let’s straighten out the ownership of the Zoom meeting so anyone can be host and record.
(8) ********* [ideation, Ned] How do we decide between “do it the simple way so beginners will understand” vs “do it the best way and help people understand what it means”? Related: explicit vs implicit.
Examples:
Which do we prefer in Python code:
for num, thing in enumerate(my_things):
print(f"{num}: {thing}") |
num = 0
for thing in my_things:
print(f"{num}: {thing}")
num += 1 |
Which do we prefer in JavaScript:
for(let i = 0; i < array.length; i++) {
const element = array[i];
console.log(element, i);
}
vs:
array.forEach((element, i) => console.log(element, i)); |
Which do we prefer in GitHub Actions:
on:
push:
branches: ["master"]
pull_request:
branches:
- "**"
workflow_dispatch: |
on:
push:
branches: ["master"]
pull_request:
workflow_dispatch: |
[quest] Although the latter syntax works, is it clearly documented anywhere? I don’t see it explicitly mentioned in https://docs.github.com/en/actions/reference/workflow-syntax-for-github-actions#onpushpull_requestbranchestags
Discussion outcomes:
Use what’s idiomatic for the language/framework
If it’s potentially confusing even for someone familiar with that language/framwork, add an explanatory comment
The GitHub Actions example is a little tricky because most of us are still new to it, and best practice idioms are still being formed
(5) ***** [quest, Ben W] Should we discuss a top-level strategy for supporting Optimizely experiments across the company? 
There’s an API that returns enrollment-specific experimentation data.
Some web pages also have experiment data embedded in the DOM.
But this is not consistent currently. Sometimes we scrape for this information.
Can we have a common API for the frontend code to access this data?
Either embedded on the page or via a JS call.
Note: frontend-platform currently has a few APIs today that it exposes
We need to know what the domain-specific concepts are and create their APIs.
JS API
plus: doesn’t increase page-size
plus: backing storage of the data can be anywhere: REST API, cached in local storage, JWT cookie, etc.
plus: could be used by other frontend usages (frontend plugins, etc)
idea: The implementation can be tiered:
Check for the info in a “standard” place in the DOM.
If it doesn’t exist there, check in “local storage”.
If it doesn’t exist there, call a standard “Rest API”.
(3) *** [quest, JJ] What is hackathon how does it work + 1
(4) **** [quest, Matt T] How do we make “global” decisions that may cause arguments
(2) ** [inform, Jeremy] ADR for standardizing on pytest-style assert statements in edx-platform tests (and mass automated refactoring of existing unittest assertion method usage)
(1) * [quest, Jeremy] Arif from the Arbi-BOM team has tried out a library that layers some GraphQL-like functionality on top of DRF. Would this be useful for anyone? https://django-restql.yezyilomo.com/
[inform, Matt T] I’m writing draft OEP on Django App Patterns. : https://github.com/edx/open-edx-proposals/pull/181
[quest] should people sign topics??? YES --anon. NO :(
[quest, JJ] History of Google Tag Manager + use cases + how to monitor
[quest, JJ] How to make Snowflake queries faster? Why is Snowflake slow? Why does it not have all the data?
[quest, JJ] Is there a way to send events from server > segment > Optimizely?
2021-01-28
[quest] Should David Joy rest? +2
[quest] Why is the local development environment for frontend development so difficult to set up / so different from the stage/production environment? +3
Which part of conventional commits are important to you? +3
type tag (“feat”, “fix”, etc) ++++
scope (“feat(proctoring)”)-
commit message syntax (use imperative, present tense)+----
commit message length (short) +++
include a body ++++++
commit message CaSe uSeD---
commit message footers (“fixes”, “reviewed-by”, etc) ---
breaking-change indication via ! ++-+--
BREAKING CHANGE footer -+++
[quest] Is there a good resource on the pros/cons of using an MFE vs updating existing pages in place? +1
e.g. an OEP mandating people to create MFEs under xyz conditions?
No explicit written down recommendation, but a lot of cultural push to move away from old pages for larger projects.
3 options - new MFE > Add to existing MFE > Embed React > rewrite in Backbone
Opinion
Avoid writing more backbone, always prioritize moving it out.
Backbone is not supported
we lack a bunch of institutional knowledge
it’s in es5
Embed react in current page can sometimes be done
Can be hard to do for edx-platform but much easier in other systems.
long time ago, decision was make to split frontend / backend
Studio lessons learned - fighting with Django vs React took a long time/wasn’t worth it
MFEs are build/SERVED from AWS as their own pages, and this can affect deployment considerations.
time from merge to production: 20min (vs. 1.5h from edx-platform)
Starting a new MFE is still expensive.
high start up costs/maintenance
If so, is there a how-to-make-an-mfe guide/cookie cutter app to generate MFEs somewhere?
An MFE inventory would be nice, the ownership spreadsheet has some info.
The purpose of all the MFEs are in (should be in) the READMEs of all the MFEs
We’re currently lacking a way to sync across engineering on FedX vision and in particular spending time to build and maintain that vision.
2021-01-21
[inform] Aperture has set up black auto-formatting on Credentials (our first open source repo using it), so it now matches the other repos we own (coaching and demographics). Positive feelings all around.
Check in CI, with a Make command
Can we create a pre-commit hook?
Can we create a pre-push hook?
[analysis?] I think it’d be helpful to have an our “app/code structure” formalized. There are plenty of norms we use, but I feel like a ref without a rulebook when I try to enforce them.
[quest] Which component libraries can/should be reused across MFEs? (asked by JJ who won’t be at this meeting)
Context: frontend-component-header-edx and frontend-component-footer-edx repos are used by a couple of the older MFEs but not by all. Yet we want consistent header/footers across all/a large portion of our pages…
Bonus question: who’s responsible for maintaining these components + updating them with new designs? Example: UX asked Purchase squad to use an updated footer design on the order history page. Prospectus rolled their own version, but frontend-app-ecommerce (the order history page) uses the shared frontend-component-footer-edx repo. Is the Purchase squad responsible for updating the footer design in the shared repo AND upgrading it on the MFE? Relevant ticket: https://openedx.atlassian.net/browse/REV-2073
[question] Alex: Do other themes/scrum teams maintain a distinct “engineering roadmap”? How do you maintain it, share it, get product buy-in, etc.?
[question] How do service owners know what services depend on their services? - Adam 😎
[ask] If a service has a blocking dependency on another service, and your depending service goes down, we want to have a more graceful degradation experience.
ACTION Ned Batchelder (Deactivated): Double-check if adr-notifications in #edx includes private repos. If not, what would it take to add them to the edX slack channel?
DONE: adr-notifications doesn’t include private repos.
Ned Batchelder (Deactivated) If not, what would it take to add them to the edX slack channel?
DONE: The configuration for the notification bot is separate from the bot code. The current configuration is here: https://github.com/edx/pr_watcher_configuration/blob/master/config.yml . There’s a “notify_for_private_repos” setting which is not currently being used. We could run another instance of the bot that includes private repos and only notifies internally.
2021-01-14
Discuss: Devstack next steps +1+1+1+1+1
Inform: Tutor as the basis of Open edX installation: https://github.com/edx/open-edx-proposals/pull/178 +1+1+1+1
Embedding code from one MFE in another at runtime+1+1+1
Use Case 1: Purchase squad develops its own Payment-related MFE that is dynamically incorporated in the Courseware MFE. They wouldn’t need to redeploy the Courseware.
Options
iFrame the MFE into the containing MFE
import the MFE as a library in the containing MFE
have the team redeploy the containing MFE
Use Case 2: Course Teams being able to plugin frontends securely without dependence on operators
Inform & Discuss: Core Committer program tasks on its Github Project +1
Inform & Discuss: Long-term options to address Cookie Size issue +1+1+1+1+1
Different tech stack layers (load balancers, S3, etc) have different cookie payload size limits
Our different services (internal and external) create an assortment of cookies
Users that use multiple environments (stage, edge, prod, sandbox) and multiple services (studio, lms, insights, etc) will be impacted more - since they pick up more cookies along the way.
Limits we’ve hit into along the way:
Note: Option B on the list would prevent us from scoping down usage of cookies to specific internal microservices - will want to consider tradeoffs of this.
Backlog of Questions/Discussions
This section lists a backlog of previous proposed topics that haven’t yet been discussed. |
