2023-04-10 DevEx Meetup Notes

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Demos

Conference discussion:

• Mafer

  • Devstack is still the default for MFEs. We need to improve the MFE experience in Tutor.

    • Becca: MFEs are in Tutor, right?

      • Mafer: Yes. A pain point in Tutor is that each MFE has its own container in dev mode, and each container requires some build time.

        • The first MFE worksohp required devstack, which was surpising! Tried to follow along with Tutor but it wasn’t easy.

      • Kyle: Brian S is working on a change where local npm start will work with Tutor containers.

      • Becca & Kyle: We should do a frontend session, and invite David Joy & Brian S, etc.

  • We need quick-start issues for new collaborators in DevX. Perhaps a category or tag.

  • Kyle is working on build speed.

• Becca

  • Was at the the DevOps session

  • Goal outside of 2U seems to be to replace Devstack with Tutor

  • edX/2U is a big company (even bigger after 2U acquisition) and leans heavily on Devstack, but it was interesting to see that others are so invested in Tutor

  • DevSpace

    • Jeremy B & someone on 2U SRE is interested in this

    • better local development on a Kubernetes cluster

      • you can also deploy with it, but don’t have to

      • some containers can be in prod (hosted?) mode, others in dev mode

    • Could work with Tutor & Devstack? Has a different approach to images.

    • Currently greenlit for discovery at 2U

• Kyle

  • TVM

  • Hosted solutions

    • Diana: 2U is embarking on a devleoper environment project in the near future

    • Diana’s the tech lead

    • Becca

      • Seems like we have disconnect between the folks working on hosting openedx vs the folks working on openedx development environments

      • Devspace: they give you a blank base image, avoid rebuilding

    • Kyle

      • Who did hosted devstack? John Nagro

      • Is it still used? Yes

      • Do some folks choose to use it even if they are capable of running devstack locally? Yes

Cross Pollination

• Tools/features/opportunities

• Tips and tricks

• Roadmap news

• Your Name

  • Your Item to Share

  • Additional notes

• Kyle

  • My docker build talk from the conference: https://tinyurl.com/openedx-build-fast

  • Reorienting myself after the conference & Axim’s own in-person week. Lots of view to catch up on.

  • Back to reimplementing the edx-platform assets processing now that the conference is over

    • Andrey from eduNEXT is helping with the XModule part of this

  • Brian S will be working on tutor support for npm start from host

  • Separate from this group: OpenCraft recently unified the crazy old Descriptor & Module system classes into a single XBlockRuntime class. They will soon be working on another round of edx-platform cleanup and optimization. Sharing this because anyone developing in the edx-platform core knows how complicated the legacy system was/is.

    • [Diana] Would it be possible to get them to come present some of this work at DEPR WG? ?

      • I’ll reach out! -Kyle

• Becca

  • We have a metrics-dashboard vendor we like and are hoping to be able to use to give ourselves visibility into the effects of our work

    • It’s a paid-SaaS but we might be able to share some of the insights with the community, or at least give suggestions on how to measure their own dev experience based on what we discover.

  • We have a dev data initiative next, which ideally will benefit 2U and the community

    • Loadable data – pre-provisioned course, users, etc. Making it quicker to spin up a ready-to-use dev environment.

• Diana

  • Ramping up on thinking about and getting involved in the Developer Experience project at 2U as tech lead.

    • We have had OEP-37 around for years. Looking forward to actually making it happen.

  • 2U is having a hackathon this week.

    • 2U will be occupied with the hackathon generally

    • Diana & Ned are working on getting coverage diff reports working on more PRs (probably using something like diff cover: https://pypi.org/project/diff-cover/ ?), but maybe also coveralls.

• Mafer

  • TVM: Tutor version/environment manager. Slides from conference: https://tinyurl.com/tvm-slides-2023

    • Yagnesh likes TVM

  • I have in my todo the doc about patches in Tutor, and then other cli around patches.

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

• Kyle

  • Busy after the conference. Lots to follow up on. Not a bad thing!

    • Mafer: +1

• Mafer

  • Starting with MFEs

• Becca

  • Things move a little slowly at 2u and we have a lot of interruptions

Successes

• DevExp wins!

• Kyle

  • Lots of great DevX and generally DevOps discussions & presentations at the conference.

  • +1

• Mafer

  • My first talk 🎉

• Your Name

  • Your Item of Success to Share

Suggested Action Items

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