Following up on Grudgingly Accepting AI Coding Assistants, I have a small win from my first experiment with GitHub Copilot: a Python script for converting portions of an Open API specification file to a CSV. There is nothing revolutionary in this small win; countless programmers have doubtlessly done much more. But a reluctant engineer has to start somewhere.
"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).
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).
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
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
Full write-up of experiments in MongoDB connection string tuning with Ed-Fi Project Meadowlark: RND-380: MongoDB Connection Pooling
As education agencies increasingly look for cost-savings and scalability benefits through adoption of hybrid or cloud-only IT infrastructures, it is natural to ask: what should an ideal Ed-Fi installation look like in the cloud?
Continue reading on wwww.ed-fi.org...
The Ed-Fi Tech Congress in Phoenix, of April 2018, was a sink or swim moment for me, as I had just started working for the Ed-Fi Alliance. Among the first people I met was a representative from one of the big technology companies. The conversation quickly turned to the question of how to deal with data when the vendor would not send it directly into the Ed-Fi ODS/API. He asked me, "why not just put it in a data lake?" To which I had no reply. Nearly four years later, at last I can give a reasonable reply.
Continue reading on wwww.ed-fi.org...
‘Ed-Fi is open’: thus the Ed-Fi Alliance announced its transition from a proprietary license to the open source Apache License, version 2.0, in April, 2020 (FAQ). Moving to an open source license is a clear commitment to transparency: anyone can see the source code, and the user community knows that their right to use that code can never be revoked. But this change is about more than just words: as the list of contributions below demonstrates, embracing open source is also about participation.
In this second year of #edfiopensource we are asking ourselves – and the community – what comes next? What can we do, together, to unlock further innovation and deliver more tools that make use of student data in new, practical, and transformative ways?
Continue reading on wwww.ed-fi.org...
While the Ed-Fi Alliance has made investments to improve the installation processes for its tools, it is still a time–consuming task: easy to get wrong, you must have the right runtime libraries, and it is problematic to have multiple versions running on the same server.
What if end-users could quickly startup and switch between ODS/API versions, testing out vendor integrations and new APIs with little development cost and with no need to manage runtime dependencies? Docker containers can do that for us.
Continue reading on ed-fi.org…
