September 16, 2016

Meeting with edX chief scientist: Piotr Mitros (Deactivated)

• Using UUID is typically not a good technique. Leads to a lot of bugs. Can we use deterministic unique IDs instead?
  • A SHA/MD5 hash of unique information (e.g. generating machine IP, time stamp, name, and possibly content).
  • Something semantic (e.g. notification-18.72.1.45-email-pmitros-98451)
• Handling aggregation
  
  1. You have __ new messages
  2. "Due this week" email – summarize and combine all deadlines into something nice
• Should not couple channels and delivery
  • We want to build XBlocks without knowing what (future) delivery channels the deployment may support
  • We want to be able to add channels to an edX deploy without breaking existing XBlocks
• xBlock configuration
  • finding all types of notifications in the xBlock
  • the user policy UI can aggregate all the notification types from all xBlocks in the course - so users can configure xBlock-specific notifications
• Websockets have limited support in django (as of when last looked)
• Look at ejabberd for a messaging layer
  • Erlang high speed notification framework. Started as a chat system, but ended up working in many other places due to ridiculous scaling