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...
Prompted by a class I'm taking, I decided to try running Python from Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL; actually, WSL2 to be specific). Installing Python in Ubuntu on Windows was relatively easy, though I did run into a couple of little problems with running poetry. Bigger challenge: running graphical user interfaces (GUIs) from WSL. Here are some quick notes from my experience.
Screenshot shows that I'm running Windows 10, and shows a small GUI window opened from both Powershell and from Bash using the same Python script.
Goal: setup PowerShell Core and .NET for development in Ubuntu running in Windows subsystem for Linux (WSL). And a few other tools.
Motivation: porting PowerShell scripts for .NET development on Linux, thus enabling more programmers to develop on a certain codebase and enabling use of Linux-based containers for continuous integration and testing.
Author Neal Stephenson, in his essay "In the Beginning... Was the Command Line," memorably compares our graphical user interfaces to Disney theme parks: "It seems as if a hell of a lot might be being glossed over, as if Disney World might be putting one over on us, and possibly getting away with all kinds of buried assumptions and muddled thinking. And this is precisely the same as what is lost in the transition from the command line interface to the GUI. (p52)
With new programmers whose experience has been entirely mediated through an
IDE like Visual Studio or Eclipse, I have sometimes wondered if they are understanding the "buried assumptions" and suffering from "muddled thinking" due to their lack of understanding of the basic command line operations that underlie the automation provided in the IDE. I still recall when I was that young developer, who had started with nothing but the command line, and realized that Visual Studio had crippled my ability to know how to build and test .NET Framework solutions (setting up an automated build process in Cruise Control helped cure me of that).
‘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...
Spurred on by the goal of giving a brown bag tech talk on the subjects of test-driven development and SOLID object oriented design principles, I've finally collected all of the "wisdom" I've learned over the years into one place: Best Practices in Test-Driven, Object Oriented, Green- and Brownfield Development. I plan to keep this as a living document, adding or modifying as I continue to deepen my knowledge through feedback, study, and further experiments.
