Arch Hour: 2020-09-24

Owned by Nimisha Asthagiri (Deactivated)
Last updated: Sept 24, 2020 by Ned Batchelder (Deactivated)
2 min read

Topics

Please enter your proposed topics for discussion here.
In Lean Coffee Style (link1, link2), we will vote on which topics the group wants to discuss and time-box the discussion to 10 or 15mns → 5mns (if re-voted) → 5mns (if re-voted).

  • Questions about frontend-platform and edx-platform (AJ and David Joy)

    • Background

      • frontend-platform contains logging, i18n, etc.

      • only used in MFEs

        • (we’ve decided in the past that frontend-platform shouldn’t be anywhere except MFEs)

      • AJ ran into trouble trying to write new frontend code in edx-platform

        • tried to pull frontend-platform into edx-platform

      • options were:

        • duping code

          • Treat as a temporary hack/tech debt and update later when the page becomes an MFE

        • making frontend-platform a dep of edx-platform

        • iframe in your new code into edx-platform

        • Extract service implementations from frontend-platform to be used directly

        • just saying “sorry, you need to make an MFE”

      •  

  • Pull Request templates: good? bad? how to make them work?

    • Often 90% of the template doesn’t apply

    • Many people don’t edit the template at all, which ends up worse than having the description empty

    • It’s possible to have a check fail and block merging unless the PR description meets certain criteria, example: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/issue-pull-request-body-regex-validator

    • Much of this is down to organizational culture, OpenCraft has a template they use consistently and Braden & others get people to comply

    • What kind of templates are useful?

      • Checklist of “did you do these important things that are often forgotten?”

      • Guidance on “did you include this important information about this change?”

  • Branding: How can we keep branded edX Strings separate from the open source code (right now English string values are also edX-branded string values)

    • We’ll want to change wording in many places to match our branding, but only on edx.org

    • How do we do this in a way that plays nicely with our code, frameworks, and i18n tooling/community?

    • Where would the override strings live?

    • Will this get even harder if we want to change layout, add widgets, etc.?

    • Isn’t this what the community has wanted from theming for ages, and now it’s our problem also?

    • It’s possible to merge po files such that one takes priority, which could handle some cases: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1894071 (use a translation file to replace the text in the open source code with our branded text)

Backlog of Questions/Discussions

This section lists a backlog of previous proposed topics that haven’t yet been discussed.

  • React - Discussions Forum - editor input - draft JS

  • Shopping cart deprecation with Diana

    • lessons learned, knowledge sharing on dead code, etc.