2023-01-24 DevExp Meetup Notes

Demos

Q&A: What dev env(s) are you and your org using?

• 2u - mostly still on devstack

  • some running devstack on ec2 instances

    • Now required for new hires because M1 macs don’t play well with devstack

    • anecdotally faster than devstack and easier to get going (no provisioning!)

      • db comes pre-provisioned as well as part of the AMI

  • trying out Tutor but have hit a few blockers, some of which have been resolved

    • Because very few people are fully switched over the value proposition is still not clear

• OpenCraft

  • Trying to shift to Tutor but also hitting roadblocks so often reverting to devstack

    • @Farhaan Bukhsh at least is not yet able to fully justify the time investment to switching, but is starting to experiment with Tutor

  • Tutor is slowly becoming the default

• eduNEXT

  • Using both Tutor and devstack

  • Just last week moved to use Tutor with k8s

    • One group produced the image with Tutor, one group created the k8s/argoCD structure, another group of consultants who use devstack

      • They like direct manipulation available with devstack and so use Tutor images with devstack around it

  • MaFer is able to use Tutor pretty solidly

• tCRIL

  • Also both Tutor and devstack

  • A lot of developers work exclusively on edx-platform, so they use Tutor

  • People who work on multiple services (like B

Cross Pollination

• Tools/features/opportunities

• Tips and tricks

• Roadmap news

• Your Name

  • Your Item to Share

  • Additional notes

• Jeremy Bowman

  • Cloud-based dev env tooling discovery findings

  • WIP outcome of [Discovery] Cloud-based developer environments · Issue #82 · edx/edx-arch-experiments

• Connor

  • Not a ton of work on bindmount stuff –

  • worked a little on hosted (ec2) devstack stuff for sharable multi-user scenarios which people seem really receptive to

    • It is helpful for internal review (esp. for cross-repo complex features which require setup for what is a 30 second smoke test)

    • Might be an interesting thing to add the dev. env vision?

  • Additional notes:

• Jeremy Bowman

  • Development Environment Vision status

• Mafer

  • Tool that allows you to manage several Tutor development environments https://tvm.docs.edunext.co/en/latest/

  • To use Tutor in a production env in eduNEXT we use manifest and a tool called Shipyard, and with that, we use ArgoCD. I can bring more details at the next meeting, but I think a college will discuss it at the conference. Shipyard: https://github.com/eduNEXT/shipyard

• Farhaan

  • Started to do development with Tutor right now we have tool that use tutor extensively opencraft / dev / Grove · GitLab

• .

• Kyle

  • Related to my “challenge” below… i’m going to be putting together a tCRIL-funded project pitch to finish where BD-39 started (upgrading react, paragon, libsass, etc. in edx-platform)

  • I’m interested in removing the Python from the edx-platform build pipeline. ADR to come.

Challenges

• Each challenge should have a follow up action.

• If you have an idea for follow up actions, add it.

• Or if you aren’t sure, leave it blank.

• We’ll discuss all actions either way.

• Your Name

  • Your Item of Challenge to Share

  • Idea for Follow Up Action

• Connor

  • Attempting to use tutor for tutor dev and devstack for feature development on the same machine

    • +1 from Becca

  • Idea for Follow Up Action: using hosted devstack now, which frees up my local machine to run tutor

• Kyle

  • Many edx-platform frontend frameworks are still way out of date: in particular, libsass and paragon. This was hard for me because it means that we can’t use newer Sass compilation tools (node-sass or dart-sass) which would simplify our asset pipeline.

  • Some simplifications to Tutor’s tutor.hooks API coming soon – goal is less confusion between different ways of calling the API ("cli:jobs" vs. CLI_JOBS, etc)

• Jeremy Bowman

  • Very high latency in PR reviews across team boundaries

  • Working on process improvements involving https://github.com/orgs/edx/projects/17/views/1 to raise visibility (rough sketch in https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bja3xvWZ3mrZ6AVDKPXlGTsq9EeWvcZIchEIXyMbz0w/edit# )

• Becca

  • Tutor slows down my machine dramatically

  • Copyfrom is also pretty slow and makes manipulating the environment hard

  • Possible solution/diagnostic: use the docker command from make stats in devstack

    • @Kyle McCormick Docker stats command?

Successes

• DevExp wins!

• Kyle

  • We are all here to help make some successes in the future.

  • Propose a tutor-related tlka for the conference

• Your Name

  • Your Item of Success to Share

• Jeremy Bowman

  • Finished discovery on engineering metrics to track as we make DevExp improvements

  • https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SH7B8YOHArkKp7OF4qPnUuh2Rit_syVaOfjbbFWqmXw/edit#gid=0

  • Sketch of plan at https://github.com/edx/edx-arch-experiments/issues/169

• Mafer

  • Propose a talk for the conference that I hope is helpful to use Tutor env and improve dev experience.

Suggested Action Items

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https://github.com/openedx/wg-developer-experience/issues