State of Developer Experience WG (March 2023)

Date: Mar 20, 2023

Introduction

The DevX Working Group focuses, unsurprisingly, on improving the experience for developers contributing to the Open edX platform and its extensions. It is under the DevOps Working Group umbrella.

Accomplishments

Over the past year, we:

• Formed in December 2022, and have since had our first few sync meetups & async updates.

• Delivered incremental improvements to the Tutor development experience, including: plugin API simplifications, a new patch-listing CLI, simplified provisioning instructions, and edx-platform build speed-ups.

• Did preparatory work for bigger projects in 2023 (see next section).

Concrete Plans - Next 6 Months

Over the next six months, we’ll be:

• continuing comparative research into development environment options,

• continuing development of metrics for measure the developer experience,

• continuing to make Tutor work better with local copies of repositories, and

• completely rewriting the edx-platform asset processing system (ADR) for speed and simplicity.

Our board: https://github.com/orgs/openedx/projects/37/views/1

Our top-level initiatives and epics: https://github.com/openedx/wg-developer-experience/issues/1

Future Vision for the Group (Optional)

Going forward, we’re going to continue to simultaneously:

1. Make Open edX itself simpler, so that its developer tooling can be simpler.

2. Improve Tutor for Open edX development.

3. Research and compare various development environment solutions, hopefully landing on a cohesive development environment vision.