2021 Nov - 2022 March

7 Feb (24 Jan - 4 Feb)

Glad (things that went well/I liked) 

  • Maria’s CC nomination has five “yes” votes! 

  • Adolfo started! :fire: :100: :dancing-dinosaur: :party-wizard:

  • Live-Share is a great tool for Pair-Programming. And since we use GitHub it is very easy to import a repository and work with friends online!

  • Engineering Demos went well. Learned lots, and have more ideas for Demos we can share with the entire community!

  • We talked about stopping the docs decoupling work before we did a lot of work that might have gotten thrown away. +1

  • Tutor: After a week+ of working on backlog, Regis and I agreed on a first dev milestone - a ‘v1’ stable plugin interface

  • Tutor: Becca will be leading a ‘DevEnv WG’ to get 2U employees to try out Tutor & give us feedback 

  • [Adolfo] Super exciting first week - thanks for all the one-on-ones so far!

Mad/Angry/Oh gosh darnit

Nothing!!

Sad/Disappointed 

  •  Product/Design coordination meeting did not happen

  • Got feedback from a new engineering manager at edX that they worried tCRIL was a black box

    • [Feanil] Maybe we should ask to be a visiting speaker at eng All-hands

      • They suggested office hours, which I’d like to try +1

        • I think an intro plus the on-going office hours is a good combo.

    • Takeaways

      • Readme updates, tcril website?

      • Push info out

      • Maybe public office hours?

      • New roadmap ideas → Jenna

    • What we’re gonna do

      • Sarina will record some videos, incl an ‘intro to tCRIL’ video

        • Feanil will help makes intro to tcril slides

      • Office hours, have the EM help us plug them on the 2u side

Accomplished (things we’re proud of, big or smol)

  • Got issue templates going for DEPR & tcril-eng gh requests; got actions working to put them on gh beta boards & add comments 

  •  Merged OEP-54 and an immediate update

  • Excited to do the github cleanup.  We have nearly 100 teams with nothing in them. Glad to start on this work. 

  • [Adolfo] First frontend working group meeting representing tCRIL

  •  12 Provider interviews scheduled (8 finished) 

  • Discovery work for in-platform surveys

  • We’ve transferred the IMS certifications to tCRIL

  • Helped to unblock Arch-BOM’s message bus work with openedx-events arch discussion threads

 

24 Jan

Glad (things that went well/I liked)

  • Repo migration complete!

    • The issues we found during the transfer were quick to fix.

  • [sarina] Enjoyed an extremely over-time catchup with djoy

  • Really enjoying Games & Hangs, thanks for coming! +1 +1

  • [Feanil] RTD Cleanup is going well and is helping us split the docs up more clearly.

  • [Carlos] Lots of TLC on the symmath to openedx-calc PR from Kyle and Dave

Mad/Angry/Oh gosh darnit

  • Openedx-calc and symmath were in rough shape: no linting for the former, minimal unit testing + dead code for the latter. Big props to Carlos for enabling linting for all of it and writing an issue to tackle the dead/untested code, on top of his existing ticket

    • Related to ^, I really wish we had fewer repos and less code

Sad/Disappointed 

  • Had planned to meet with someone for tCRIL chatting but unfortunately cancelled at the last minute – COVID.

Accomplished (things we’re proud of, big or smol)

  • We transferred all the repos.

  • We deleted a bunch of old RTD repos.

  • Synthesized and coalesced around a high-level tCRIL Roadmap

  • Carlos fixed up openedx-calc and added symmath to it

  • Merged changes to de-edxify the arbiter guidelines in OEP-1

  • Finalized conference decision

  • Ready to release automated individual contributor CLA signing

Funny

I played this game with my girlfriend’s family and I think we’d have a good time with it: https://25words.com/ (never tried it online). Scratches the codenames itch but with a timer too +1

10 Jan (3 Jan - 8 Jan) *Short Retro*

Glad (things that went well/I liked)

  • Tutor project starting up. Looking forward to working with Regis, Diana, Becca

  • Tutor itself is really exciting – I think it could be (or already is) the “extension framework of extension frameworks” that Open edX needs to glue together all the different plugin points that currently exist

  • tcril-onboarding docs is up and running

  • Consensus that most private decoupling tickets can be made public - now we can actually organize our work and start looking at a board during standup

  • I got new ski boots - Kyle [GAME CHANGER]

  • Holidays were a nice break. Feeling refreshed.

    • Our household got a Nespresso machine for Christmas, so I’m 200% more caffeinated on a daily basis now. - Dave

  • Roadmap workshop - very impressed with everyone’s input and was a huge learning experience for me

  • SRE got edx-platform-openedx-ci up and running, so we’re good for transfer of the edx-platform repo.

  • Repo move for our 100+ repos-in-a-day went smoothly

  • Working with Peter Pinch on writing stuff (blog posts, release notes, OEP) has been productive & pleasant 

  • Three meetings with edX PMs set this week

Mad/Angry/Oh gosh darnit

  • (annoyed): continued problems with laptops :P

Sad/Disappointed 

  • * The edx-documentation repo is kind of a mess and clean separation seems daunting at the moment.(It’s early days so this will likely change as I learn more.) - Feanil

  • Nizar leaving OpenCraft

  • The recent wave of edX departures. I get it but it still makes me sad.

Accomplished (things we’re proud of, big or smol)

  • Got release notes out for Maple, and blog posts written (going out this week)

  • Most repos have been moved to openedx with minimal to no issues on the edX side.

  • First round of roadmap planning (Thurs workshop)

    • First pass at synthesis and next steps in process

  • Finished adding forum moderators as core contributors

  • First iteration of GitHub access management, using GitHub issues

  • first iteration of tcril-onboarding docs

  • First draft of Provider Survey 

  • Worked out process for enriching/analyzing Heroku census data

  • Legacy OEROADMAP fully represented on Community Roadmap

Funny

  • tCRIL doesn’t do funny

  • Nope, nothing. 

  • The “H” in tCRIL stands for humor

23 December (13 Dec - 23 Dec)

Glad (things that went well/I liked)

  • Repo moves are mostly going well, only finding small issues and getting them fixed quickly.

    • Kudos to Feanil (and Ned?) for hammering out the sequencing. It’s been a really valuable way to take our small bumps (e.g. GitHub Pages) in a responsible way. +1

    • Been having a lot of fun storming on this. I usually shy away from pairing / group working sessions but they ended up being great.

  • [Carlos] Iterating on WIP PRs in tcril-onboarding

  • Dinner with Dave! +1+1

  • Open edX event went very well (props to Eden!) +1+1

  • Decoupling sync meetings seem productive and help get everyone on the same page

  • [Sarina] enjoying writing my first OEP (pr here)

  • [Ed] Maple was released

  • [Ed] Many Maple blog posts queued up thanks to Sarina and Eden

  • [Ed] Lead form from http://open.edx.org now directly connected to Salesforce.

  • [Ed] CLA data now mostly accurate in Salesforce

  • [Dave] Devstack issues aside, the M1 laptops are nice.

  • [Dave] Very happy Tutor+ARM64 work decently well, and Braden was the one that did all the hard work of figuring out how to support it properly a few weeks ago (go community!)

  • [Jenna] Productive series of meetings with folks at MIT, OpenCraft, edX, plus 3 WGs and I feel much more grounded in background/context

  • [Kyle] It makes me really happy to see that we and potentially edX are moving forward with Tutor. Both because it seems like the right move, and because it’s exciting to see something that was not planned and developed by edX getting official recognition and use.

  • [Sarina] really enjoyed the Team Fun Time, thanks to Feanil to getting that organized

  • [Kyle] (could also be Sad, kinda) The experimental-docker-images-in-devstack work I’ve been doing will be mostly obviated by Tutor. But, I learned a ton from the work, and I’m encouraged that new non-Ansible edx-platform images do work with existing devstack services.

  • [Dave]: I WAS TAKEN OFF THE OPSGENIE ROTATION! :-D +1

Mad/Angry/Oh gosh darnit

  • Transifex WG meeting was rescheduled, and only a few people were notified. At least the meeting link has been fixed.

  • [Kyle] Too. Many. Slack. Channels.

    • [Dave] I don’t mind having too many, but since they’re closed channels, I’m never sure if I’m in all the ones I need to be. Like when I didn’t realize we had a staff channel for the first few days. :-P

      • [Kyle] This ^

    • How could we discover the channels when they’re private?

Sad/Disappointed 

  • Not sure when to be mad.

  • Dell laptop still flaky after recent tweaks, mostly using it as a second monitor for browser and slack.

Accomplished (things we’re proud of, big or smol)

  • edX “champions” have moved to a distributed model - shared Slack rooms rather than individuals. Evolution of Champions for Core Contributors

  • 50 repos already in `openedx` org and working as expected.

  • Everyone was invited to the `openedx` org, and nearly everyone accepted.

  • New m1s arrived and we’ve done a good job setting them up

  • Draft agenda for road dev workshop nearly complete

  • Drafts for roadmap maturation workflows + services in progress

  • Tutor devstack on M1! :-)

  • OEROADMAP to Comm Roadmap comparison/cleanup making solid progress

Funny

  • [sarina] Caught Simon eating my tree: ​​​​

13 December (1 Dec - 10 Dec)

Glad (things that went well/I liked)

  • Team social lunch was fun & went well! +1

  • Everyone is funny. I generally enjoy all the meetings because everyone adds their personalities

  • New laptops!

  • Scripting portion of repo transfer is in good shape +1

  • Lack of overwhelming number of meetings here at tCRIL +3

    • Related: I’ve had lots of time for deep focused work

  • Having space to focus on a long-overdue technical investment (using the in-repo Dockerfiles) has been really fun and satisfying.

  • Folks entertained and had interesting things to say on my CMS vs Studio ADR PR.

  • Productive first two weeks without feeling frenetic - that’s a great combination.  

Mad (ex: avoidable things that inhibited progress)

Sad (ex: unavoidable things that inhibited progress)

  • Sometimes hard to get coordination cross-organizations in the community

Accomplished (things we’re proud of, big or smol)

  • All the user invitations went out.

  • All the team shells were migrated (team name/slug/description)

  • You can run devstack with the new in-repo edx-platform Dockerfile now (not completely smoothed out yet, but things are looking good).

  • Wrote a unit for MOOC FLOSS course that Xavier & non-OC people are writing

  • Open Enrollment by the due date

  • Carlos is a certified belayer at Central Rock Gym now

  • Onboarding: Completed 1:1s with tCRIL teams; halfway through intro 1:1s with 2U, MIT

  • Attended one WG, scheduled to attend a second

  • Asked lots of context/background questions :)

  • Ed & Diana agreed to move DEPR to GitHub issues 



Working Groups:

  • Contributor’s Meetup: Sarina

  • BTR :

    • Sarina (fly on wall, not volunteering)

    • Kyle

  • Transifex WG:

    • Carlos

  • Frontend WG



  • Marketing WG

    • Is this marketing Open edX as a whole, or a marketing site for Open edX instances?

    • Eden

  • Data WG:

    • Ed

  • Security WG (soon):

    • Feanil

  • DEPR WG:

    • Dave

Goals for what we take away from WGs:

  • Getting things on the roadmap?

    • This isn’t necessary for some groups, like BTR, which keeps good notes/tickets.

  • Aim for consistency between practices between groups?

    • Certain baselines: Finding out what’s going on easily, initiative shared roadmaps for large epics, shared calendars for all working groups so that community members coming in can find things that interest them.

      • (We’ve had a lot of problems with permissions as chairs change.)

    • Different groups will operate differently. Just looking for a small framework. Meetings will be run differently, different cadences, etc. But basic things like calendaring, e.g. using GitHub projects vs. Trello, etc., promote public rooms, etc.

      • Note: Not everyone in the Transifex group uses GitHub.

  • David J. wrote this: https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/COMM/pages/46793351

  • Observe for a couple of months before trying to suggest format changes.

 


1 December (16 Nov - 30 Nov)

Glad (things that went well/I liked)

  • Carlos (SWE) started!

  • Jenna (Product Mgr) started!

  • TCRIL started!

  • Thanksgiving break!

  • Loving the tag-teaming on the Github repo transfer work.

  • Barrier(Synergy Fork) works great without too much trouble to share Keyboard, Mouse and Clipboard between two computers.

  • [Carlos] First two weeks were pretty smooth!

  • We committed to moving off of TravisCI instead of bringing the baggage with us, and we’re nearly there.

  • I am enjoying GH issues for a lot of reasons and I’m hoping we stick with it!

  • I’m enjoying writing code and not fixing prod fires.

    • +1

  • I like the async standup + sync parking lot discussions.

    • +1

  • Accounts transfer went more smoothly than I thought it would. Thank you to everyone for all the help at various points.

Mad (ex: avoidable things that inhibited progress)

  • The Maple changes page, while much better than nothing, is non-exhaustive and in parts outdated. I hope we can do better for Nutmeg, but I’m not sure how. 

    • +100. I wonder if this is something we could automate a bit by a bot (ie, when a commit msg is `feat:` we send a message on merge that’s like “congrats on your merged feature, add it to this page!”)

      • Maybe we could grab all of them from git and spit them out somewhere automatically?

        • That’s partially what conventional commits are for, right?

          • My concern with that is that it’s a LOT to wade through across tons of repos. I’d love a per-squad summary of their most impactful and important changes.

Sad (ex: unavoidable things that inhibited progress)

  • Carlos had to set up all his accounts twice in two days

  • The dell laptops we got don’t run linux very well and don’t have a trackpoint.

    • ? Feanil or Kyle?

Accomplished (things we’re proud of, big or smol)

  • Added 3 new CCs (Matjaz & Ali Hugo & Nizar Mahmoud), bringing total to 31

  • Merged OEP-31 (i18n/l10n infra standards for MFEs)

  • [all] Heroically moved over a gazillion accounts, passwords, preferences, etc

  • First (two) merged PRs