Meeting Notes February 23, 2020

Before you dive into the notes, please make sure you have read the following:

• Chapter's README
• Chapter's Vision

In Attendance

• Project Lead: Quincy Larson
• Fran Zekan
• Jim Ciallella
• Cecilia Constantine
• Mihir Somani

Agenda

Review development progress from the previous two weeks.

Development Progress

• Fran started us out with a joke that landed hard due to internet lag, paraphrasing "I don't think we're on the same page, but I hope we can at least get on the same Chapter today" - Fran Zekan
• Fran has started React UIs #341 to CRUD events and #342 to CRUD locations, while others are continuing work on the APIs and other backend issues
• For the search bar, it was agreed in earlier issue #32 to use PostgreSQL queries instead of ElasticSearch. This has the advantage for now of keeping Docker instance size smaller for the MVP because we can use the existing PostgreSQL container instead of lumping in additional ElasticSearch container.
• Quincy added an issue #349 for Fran to implement the search functionality for Chapters. We do not intend to search events or other content at this time.
• Fran shared screenshots of basic admin UIs for listing, creating and deleting locations and editing locations
• Cecilia mentioned there aren't a lot of bite sized to-dos on the front-end. Fran will create smaller Beginner Friendly issues to help people get involved.
• Cecilia asked if any work was being done to improve SEO. Certain React patterns will harm SEO, but Fran said it’s pretty easy to implement a service like Create React App to help SEO.
• Quincy suggested Cecilia to create an issue to define the SEO meta tags and JSON-LD markup for events and other rich snippets to pick up on the earlier SEO requirements

Email Service

• Jim suggested sticking with SMTP with nodemailer to keep the email sending more flexible.
• SMTP should eliminate the need to install, or else dynamically enable, nodemailer plugins.
• SMTP doesn't have an impact on deliverability since it’s only used to send email to the relaying server. However, we will want to strongly encourage the instance owners to setup SPF, DKIM records using the instructions from their preferred transactional email service’s documentation.
• SMTP doesn't mean we expect organizations to host their own email sending servers. However, large organizations may have their own internal SMTP, which will work just the same as using a 3rd party service.
• The intention is to steer organizations to select a 3rd party relaying transactional mail service and communicate with these services over an SMTP connection.
  • AWS SES - no charge for the first 62,000 emails per month
  • Mailgun - 3 months free of 3,000, then .80 per 1000 emails
  • Mailjet - 200 / day, 6000 / month free, then $8.69 per 30000 emails per month
  • Mandrill- no free tier, $20 / block of 25000 emails (equivalent to .80 per 1000)
  • Postmark - 100 free emails / month, then $10 for 10000 and $1.25 per 1000 emails
  • Sendgrid - 30-day trial only, then up to 100 emails / day for free. Then, $14.95 for 100,000 emails per month
• Fran suggested using Heroku 1-click install for the MVP. This will allow configuration of the .env (environment variables) through Heroku’s interface, such as the SMTP variables. Fran posted a screenshot of the Heroku ENV interface in Discord

Documentation

Jim stubbed out Administrator FAQs

The group agreed to continue with the FAQ and collapse / expand pattern on the Wiki.

Next Meeting

• Ping Quincy on Discord for meeting invites.
• The developer group, including Quincy, Fran, and Josh Ghent, will meet on Thursday to talk about prototyping the HTML. The design group is optionally invited. Another follow-up the next Thursday with this group
• The next Chapter meeting will be on , 2020. Quincy will send invites closer to the meeting.