2024-06-24 Meeting notes

Owned by Jeremy Huff
Last updated: Jun 24, 2024 by Maccabee LevineVersion comment

Date

Attendees 


Discussion items

TimeItemWhoNotes
1 minScribeAll
Maccabee Levine is next, followed by Craig McNally

Reminder:  Please copy/paste the Zoom chat into the notes.  If you miss it, this is saved along with the meeting recording, but having it here has benefits.

5-10 minLiaison Updates

Maccabee Levine

Tod Olson

Jakub Skoczen

Craig McNally

Jenn Colt 

  • CC: Maccabee Levine
    • Elections: one day left
    • MOU: CC wants to follow up (sometimes) after TC approval of new modules, how do they know.  I shared the Jira project, possible alerts.  They will raise with co-chairs.
    • Application Formalization: they want to be in the loop more.  Mike Gorrell will join and serve as CC liaison.
  • PC: Tod Olson
  • RMS Group: Jakub Skoczen 
    • Jakub not present
  • Security Team: Craig McNally 
    • Craig not present
  • Tri-council Application Formalization: Jenn Colt  
    • No meeting last week or update. Meet again this week.
1 minUpcoming MeetingsAll
  •   - Dedicated Discussion - PR Templates
    • Jeremy Huff Worth a Wednesday discussion.
      • Craig McNally We did discuss and decided to leave it up to individual teams.  Templates lead to misleading information.  We can make a decision (DL) but people will continue asking.
      • Jeremy Huff If there is a decision log, we can supply a link.
      • Maccabee Levine We invited developers to raise issues and this was one of them, so it's to our credibility that we respond.
      • Tod Olson Part of the templates discussion was having some amount of consistency.  Where are the places we need consistency to remove friction, as opposed to causing it?
      • Marc Johnson Templates being part of a consistent development process; we abandoned that a long time ago, different teams wanted to work different ways.  Teams ignored it; different opinions on why.  Some decisions we don't have enough documentation of; some disagreement on which should be centralized or not.   Should delineate between narrow PR template topic and broader consistency values topic.
      • Jeremy Huff How does TC want to deal with the larger question?  Not in one Wednesday meeting.
  •   - Regular TC Meeting - New Co-Chair
  •   - Dedicated Discussion - RFC Retrospective
  •   - Regular TC Meeting - New Co-Chair
  •   - Dedicated Discussion - Topic TBD
10 -15 minTCR Board ReviewAll
  • We will establish a TCR Round Robin to support the TCs module evaluation responsibilities.
    • Jeremy Huff Simple iterating through the TC members list as we do with scribe?  Outside reviewers also valuable.
    • Marc Johnson Rota will change after TC election, may want to set in new FY.  Also is everyone able / comfortable of doing an eval, or do we need pairs?
    • Maccabee Levine Membership will change in two people.  Agree some people may need help to do a review, but don't think you need to be a developer.  Pairs help reasonable.
    • Jeremy Huff Agree vast majority of criteria can be verified without developer expertise.
    • Florian Gleixner If you don't try, you don't know if you can do it.  It's less digging into the code and mostly liaising with the developers.  Think everyone on the TC can do them.
    • Jenn Colt I did one for the first time a few months ago.  Worthwhile for everyone to get the experience, everyone on TC should understand it.  Just be clear what is expected from the reviewer.
    • Jeremy Huff Ingolf was a lot more thorough than I was, running the module.  Different people bring different strengths to the eval.
    • Owen Stephens As an evaluee, TC members had good technical understanding.  Don't know if that's required but experience would have been different.
    • Jeremy Huff No problem with an evaluator reaching out to people for help with one aspect of it.
    • Maccabee Levine Practically can either do a rota if we think they will be mostly solo reviews, or a table with "last review date" if we think it will be mostly pairs.
    • Jeremy Huff Let's vote to try the round-robin method, modelled after scribe approach for some period of time.  Allows for skipping over someone unable to perform duties, but would be put into rotation as soon as possible.  Can grow into more complicated method if needed.  
      • Quorum voted in favor.
    • Florian Gleixner will do mod-reading-room, Jenn Colt will do ui-reading-room (when she is back from vacation).
5 min

Technical Council Sub-Groups Updates

All

(ran out of time)

1 minRFCs

All

(ran out of time)

5 - 10 minDeveloper Advocate UpdatePatrick Pace (Unlicensed)

Activities for the month, what's next, challenges.

  • April was mostly getting acclimated to FOLIO.
  • Reviewed FOLIO resources, "things that could be better", attending TC and developer documentation subgroup meetings, Jeremy meetings.
  • Not much one-on-one help this month, still reviewing Slack.  Engaged in what I can.
  • 6m contract with possibility of renewal, so focus to change things that will last beyond me.  I.e. documentation subgroup, how does it continue.
  • Created service board, working with Peter Murray on a permissions issue.
  • Created a developer advocacy confluence space.
  • patrick@folio.org email address now.
  • Developing thoughts on a developer mentorship program, did a survey, just posted Friday but no responses yet.
  • Monthly reports: /wiki/spaces/DA/pages/290947082
  • Next
    • Make service management board available
    • Developer documentation updates
    • Touring environments with developers
  • Challenges
    • Summer
1 minAction Items

Jeremy Huff


1 minDecision LogAll


Time Permitting

Officially Supported Technologies (OST)

All
NAZoom Chat


Topic Backlog

Decision Log ReviewAll

Review decisions that are in progress.  Can any of them be accepted?  rejected?

Translation SubgroupAllSince we're having trouble finding volunteers for a subgroup, maybe we can make progress during a dedicated discussion session?
Communicating Breaking ChangesAllCurrently there is a PoC, developed by Maccabee Levine, of a utility to catalog Github PRs that have been labeled with the "breaking change" label. We would like to get developer feedback on the feasibility of this label being used more often, and the usefulness of this utility. 
Officially Supported Technologies - UpkeepAll

Previous Notes:

  • A workflow for these pages. When do they transition from one state to another. Do we even need statuses at all ?

Stripes architecture group has some questions about the Poppy release.

Zak: A handshake between developers, dev ops and the TC. Who makes that decision and how do we pass along that knowledge ? E.g. changes in Nodes and in the UI boxes. How to communicate this ? We have a large number of teams, all have to be aware of it.  TC should be alerted that changes are happening. We have a couple of dedicated channels for that. Most dev ops have subscribed to these channels. How can dev ops folk raise issues to the next level of community awareness ? There hasn't been a specific piece of TC to move that along.

Craig: There is a fourth group, "Capacity Planning" or "Release Planning". Slack is the de facto communication channel.  There are no objections to using Slack. An example is the Java 17 RFC. 

Craig: The TC gets it on the agenda and we will discuss it. The TC gets the final say.

Marc Johnson: We shouldn’t use the DevOps Channel. The dev ops folks have made it clear that it should only be used for support requests made to them.

Jakub: Our responsibility is to avoid piling up technical debt.

Marc: Some set of people have to actually make the call. Who lowers the chequered flag ?

Craig: It needs to ultimately come to the TC at least for awareness. There is a missing piece. Capacity Planning needs to provide input here. 

Marc: Stakeholders / Capacity Planning could make that decision. Who makes the decision ? Is it the government or is it some parts of the body ?

Marc: the developers community, the dev ops community and sys ops are involved. For example the Spring Framework discussion or the Java 17 discussion. But it was completely separate to the TC decision. It is a coordination and communication effort.

Marc: Maybe the TC needs to let go that they are the decision makers so that they be a moderating group.

Jakub: I agree with Marc. But we are not a system operating group. Dependency management should be in the responsibility of Release management. There are structures in the project for that.

Jason Root: I agree with Jakub and with Marc also. Policies should drive operational/release/support aspects of Folio.

Jason Root: If the idea of “support” is that frameworks are supported, then of course the project should meet that.

Marc Johnson
Some group needs to inform OleksAii when a relevant policy event occurs.
These documents effectively ARE the manifestation of the policy.

Craig: This is a topic for the next Monday session.

Craig to see if Oleksii Petrenko could join us to discuss the process for updating the officially supported technologies lists.


Dev Documentation VisibilityAll

Possible topic/activity for a Wednesday session:

Discuss/brainstorm:

  • Ideas for the type of developer-facing documentation we think would be most helpful for new developers
  • How we might bring existing documentation up to date and ensure it's consistent 
  • etc.
API linting within our backend modulesAll

https://folio-project.slack.com/archives/CAQ7L02PP/p1713343461518409


Hello team, I would like to discuss API linting within our backend modules. Some time ago, we transitioned our linting process from Jenkins to GitHub Actions as outlined in https://folio-org.atlassian.net/browse/FOLIO-3678. I am assuming that this move was done via some technical council decision. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
In my observations, I've found two problems:
  1. Schema linting does not occur if the schemas are in YAML format.
  2. There are issues with resolving some deeper references during API linting.
Although I'm unsure about how to improve the existing linting implementations within Folio, I propose to consider an open-source solution that handles OpenAPI linting effectively and allows us to define custom rules. For your reference: https://stoplight.io/open-source/spectral A test of this solution can be found in this PR: https://github.com/folio-org/mod-search/pull/567. The same PR also provides an example of custom rule definition: https://github.com/folio-org/mod-search/pull/567/files#diff-d5da7cb43c444434994b76f3b04aa6e702c09e938de09dbc09d72569d611d9ab.Also, by employing 'Spectral', I discovered AsyncAPI (https://www.asyncapi.com/en), an API design tool similar to OpenAPI but for asynchronous interactions. I suggest that we consider using AsyncAPI in FOLIO to generate documentation for Kafka interactions.


PR TemplatesAll

https://folio-project.slack.com/archives/CAQ7L02PP/p1713445649504769

Hello team, Small request to consider.
Regarding pr templates.
  1. From my perspective, pr template is not good idea. Even the biggest open source projects that are contributed by many people don't have any pr template. Currently what we have for acq modules https://github.com/folio-org/mod-orders-storage/blob/master/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md
  2. These pr template is inconsistent in different teams.
What I suggest is that, pr template shouldn't be any instructions, because most developer who are creating pr have already understand the rules. If we put just two section into template, it will encourage developers to write more about their work and that lead to knowledge  sharing among developers.
Java 21All

https://folio-project.slack.com/archives/CAQ7L02PP/p1713445764285349


Is Tech Council considering to update to java 21, I head good things from Netflix engineering teams about Garbage collector
https://www.infoq.com/presentations/netflix-java/ (edited)

Proposed Mod KafkaAll

https://folio-project.slack.com/archives/CAQ7L02PP/p1714471592534689

Mike Taylor

Proposal. If and only if a FOLIO instance is running Kafka, it should insert and enable a module called mod-kafka, which consists entirely of a module descriptor that says it provides the interface kafka. The purpose is so that other modules can use the standard <IfInterface> and similar tools to determine whether they should attempt Kafka operations. Rationale: the FOLIO ILS depends absolutely on Kafka, but other uses of the platform will not. One such example: a dev platform that includes only mod-users, used as a source of change events for Metadb.

Action Items