2023-05-22 DevEx Meetup Notes

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Demos

Scheduled Topics

1. Meet edSPIRIT!

   1. Hello Emad!

2. Apple silicon issues

   1. Arch BOM maintain devstack within 2u and we are trying to address the myriad Apple silicon issues

   2. What did Tutor do?

      1. Ghassan: Had trouble with MFEs, new tutor has better support for the ARM

         1. q: what was the trouble with mfes? a: tutor builds all the MFEs all at once

         2. https://github.com/openedx/wg-developer-experience/issues/35

         3. https://github.com/openedx/wg-developer-experience/issues/81

      2. Regis: Recently set up an ARM64 CI for tutor plugins which hit many issues

         1. We used to not provide ARM images for Tutor, but starting from Palm we do. Not yet providing images for the nightly branch, but it’s on the list of things we will probably do

         2. Tutor users have to build docker images a lot. Course authoring MFE could not build on ARM because of a missing library dependency (libpng-dev or something). You can see this change on the palm branch of the tutor MFE plugin

         3. Building images takes a long time. Building on ARM was using emulation, which took a long time. New build speed (and new ARM images) improves this

         4. Running MFEs in development: tutor runs all mfes with npm run build, which is resource-heavy and even moreso on ARM with emulation. It makes machines go boom.

            1. https://github.com/overhangio/tutor-mfe/issues/125

      3. Regardless of devstack vs tutor, there are still issues in the edx-platform itself that make running on ARM difficult, eg forums

      4. The expectation of supporting ARM came kind of suddenly

Cross Pollination

• Tools/features/opportunities

• Tips and tricks

• Roadmap news

• Kyle

  • * Likely coming soon: PR sandboxes

    • Regis: check out fly.io

    •  

  • ** edx-platform static -assets-without-Python is chugging along

    • Becca (question): is this just for tutor or will we be able to use it in devstack as well?

      • upstream changes, so devstack as well!

  • Brian S is prototyping an overhaul of Tutor MFE dev

  • **** Feanil is trying to make it easier/possible to run edx-platform without Tutor OR devstack

    • minimal.yml: minimal number of things you need to run things like migration checks

    • steps to start up edx-platform without Docker

    • trickier on a Mac

    • Old example from Regis:

• Becca (2U Arch BOM)

  • trying to reorient our priorities to make sure we’re addressing the most pressing issues for 2U developers (and hopefully, by extension, the community)

  • Going to request an M1

• Régis: new plugins \o/

• Connor

  • ** Rewriting/redocumenting blockstore “development“ practices to match its use as a plugin.

• [Diana] More folks at 2U are onboarding onto Open edX development , so we’re seeing an uptick in devstack issues

  • lots of whack-a-mole with the individual ones

  • [Becca] still trying to find a good way to keep all the issues organized and prioritized

• Ghassan:

  • * Created a plugin form dashboard

  • Still working on the blog post about luaching Open edX/Tutor form home

    • It’s becoming out of scope of Open edX, as of today I use it to run other servies

    • Looking into tunnleing free tool, to simpliify deployment

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.

• Becca: Three blocking issues at once in devstack, all on Thursday/Friday afternoon. Thread counts are in the hundreds

• Ghassa:

  • * When opening a PR of wihch takes long time to review, rebasing/resolving conflict would be a common issue.

    • It’s hard to know when is the right time to rebase given that you don’t necessarily know if/when someone will review your PR

    • auto-rebasing doesn’t really work with forks

• Kyle

  • Slow image builds are rough when hacking on the platform, looking forward to Palm with hope

Successes

• DevExp wins!

• Kyle

  • Andrey from eduNEXT decoupled XModule SCSS from LMS & CMS SCSS! Big step on the way to removing Python from the edx-platform static asset build

  • Arbi-BOM finished removing GitHub-hosted requirements from edx-platform as of later today!

• Jeremy

  • devstack no longer uses Ansible! All images switched to building from Dockerfiles in the service repos

• * Régis: Docs reorg by Brian is almost ready:

Suggested Action Items

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