In reaction to all of the “agile is dead” articles, I am cleaning up old posts about Agile, re-reading them, contemplating lessons learned but forgotten, and asking myself if some practices have outlived their usefulness. That is the spirit of agility: the interplay of action and reflection.

Amongst its many admirable principles, where does one find environmental concerns in the Bahá’í Faith? So I wondered, early on my journey on this religious path. Recently, in honor of Faith Climate Action Week, several friends and I reflected on this question.

Our conversation opened with a brief meditation on this passage of praise for God, who is recognized through all the natural wonders:

“… whatever I behold I readily discover that it maketh Thee known unto me, and it remindeth me of Thy signs, and of Thy tokens, and of Thy testimonies. By Thy glory! Every time I lift up mine eyes unto Thy heaven, I call to mind Thy highness and Thy loftiness, and Thine incomparable glory and greatness; and every time I turn my gaze to Thine earth, I am made to recognize the evidences of Thy power and the tokens of Thy bounty. And when I behold the sea, I find that it speaketh to me of Thy majesty, and of the potency of Thy might, and of Thy sovereignty and Thy grandeur. And at whatever time I contemplate the mountains, I am led to discover the ensigns of Thy victory and the standards of Thine omnipotence.”

Bahá’u’lláh, Prayers and Meditations by Bahá’u’lláh, CLXXVI.

“For the past two years, the Ed-Fi Alliance software development team has been listening to community members through its Technical Advisory Group, Special Interest Groups, and at our annual events. We have been hearing that the pace of change in the Ed-Fi ODS/API Platform needs to accelerate, shifting to a cloud-native architecture that can better support large-scale deployments while offering greater cost and performance flexibility. To do so, we need a reboot.”

→ Full article at New Cloud-Native Functionality Coming to the Ed-Fi Alliance Technology Suite

Though barely mentioned in the article, the work to create a production ready system has been dubbed Project Tanager, the third bird-related project name in my tenure with the Ed-Fi Alliance (Roadrunner, Meadowlark).

In Unpopular Opinion: It’s harder than ever to be a good software engineer, author Juraj Malencia opines that “good engineering” equates to “bring[ing] maximum value in achieving a goal.” This is a comforting thought for those of us periodically wondering if we’re still good software or data engineers, though we might not be up-to-date on the latest hype.

Pointing out that “engineering does not equal programming”, implying that we can bring great “engineering” (solutioning) value without writing a line of code, he presents a modified version of a venn diagram on how people in various roles spend their time between programming, alignment, people, and “other”. I was bemused to note I currently sit squarely in the category labeled “beware” 🤨. A position that may continue throughout this year, but will need to change over time.

Motivation

The Ed-Fi ODS/API is a REST API that support interoperability of student data systems. The API definition, via the Ed-Fi Data Standard, is extensible: many large-scale or specialized implementations add their own local use cases that are not supported out of the box by the Ed-Fi Data Standard (Extensions). Furthermore, the Data Standard receives regular updates; sometimes these are merely additive, and from time to time there are breaking changes. These factors make it impossible to create a one-size fits all client library.

But, not all is lost: the ODS/API exposes its API definition using OpenAPI, and we can use Swagger Codegen to build a client library based on the target installation’s data model / API spec. The basic process of creating a C# code library (SDK) is described in Ed-Fi documentation at Using Code Generation to Create an SDK (Note: this link is for ODS/API 7.1, but the instructions are essentially the same for all versions).

A strange thing about my job is that, although we’re all about supporting K-12 education data interoperability, we don’t actually work with any K-12 data. We build software, and others use it to collect data from disparate data sources into a single, unified, and standardized data set. But that does’t stop me from thinking about how data should be used.

On a flight out to the #STATSDC2023 conference hosted by the National Center for Educational Statistics (my first time at this event), I finally wrote down my personal principles for ethical / responsible use of data and AI. Many have written about responsible use of data; there is nothing ground breaking here. Yet it feels meaningful, even if only for myself, to acknowledge “out loud” the values and principles that I wish to hold myself accountable for whenever I do use data, encourage others to make use of data, allow my own data to be used, etc.

Full write-up of experiments in MongoDB connection string tuning with Ed-Fi Project Meadowlark: RND-380: MongoDB Connection Pooling

Design document describing approaches and appropriateness of in-memory and distributed caching for improving the performance of referential integrity checks in the Ed-Fi Meadowlark API: Resource Caching for Performance Improvements

Design document describing an event-driven approach for offline cascading updates in the Ed-Fi Meadowlark project’s document storage system: Design for Offline Cascading Updates

On July 13, a new statue was placed in the U.S. Capitol: Mary McLeod Bethune. Reading the news, I knew that I had heard this name - yet knew nothing about her. Who was this woman, the first African American to be so honored in the Hall of Statues?

Born into a large family on her parents’ farm in 1875 (she was the fifteenth child), she was taught early to look to the Bible for guidance and comfort, despite the family’s illiteracy. With help from a benefactress, she enrolled in school at the age of ten and eventually went on to collegiate study. Oft quoted as saying, “[t]he whole world opened up to me when I learned to read,” she went on to live an exceptional life of courage and action on behalf all people, most particularly her fellow African Americans and especially women of color.