All The Things

This page is meant to serve as a point of conversation, with a wide range of topics to be discussed when joining Medic or starting as a contributor. Many things are not in any particular order. The goal is to convey a general “lay of the land” so someone starting can see a lot of what’s out there without having to be surprised each day as new things pop up.

First, some general context…

What is the CHT?

• Why the CHT (Community Health Toolkit)?
• The CHT Core Framework - App that can be accessed in the browser or as PWA or native Android app.
• Offline-First - for real
• Architecture of the CHT
• Community of people and organizations. This is where we document all the things about the CHT Framework. Bookmark it as you primary source of reference.

Teams at Medic

Meet the Medic team!

• Product
• Programs
• Internal Operations
• External Affairs

Lifecycle of a CHT Application being built

1. Programs team starts relationship with an organization.
2. Service designers and app developers figure out how they want their system to work.
3. App developers take latest version of the CHT and build the app for the organization.
4. Android flavor deployed to get branded app onto CHW devices / deployment.
5. Dashboards are set up in Klipfolio, Superset or Grafana.
6. Monitoring and alerting are set up with the CHT Watchdog.
7. Go!
8. App developers make ongoing enhancements.
9. App upgraded as new versions of CHT are available.

CHT Academy

• Fantastic way to understand how certain features of the CHT work.

Now, all the things…

People/Team

Distributed team

• Without some effort, it’s easy for things to feel lonely or isolated.
• Default to asynchronous communication.
• Respect teammate timezones (including your own!).

Expensify

• Reach out to Internal Operations team for guidance on how to submit expenses and get refunded. When submitting expenses, follow up to make sure things get through.

Funding

• Restricted - Clicktime. Getting our ClickTime timesheets submitted on time is vital to source the projects adequately. If necessary, take extra steps to remind yourself of submitting these on a monthly basis. If you have any question about filling in the reports properly, reach out to the finance team.
• Unrestricted

Travel

• Team Meetups are a great way to build relations with your team! These are usually planned weeks ahead; if you feel comfortable joining, please do!
• Focused Working Groups team members may sometimes organize in-person meetups to meet with the people they serve. It’s highly recommended to join those trips to get more connected to the team and the mission!

Meetings

• There a few calls where you will be required to join. We know that depending on your timezone, you might need to adjust your calendar to be able to attend and we provide great flexibility to do so.
• Organization-wide calls are recorded.
• No meetings on Fridays, as we consider Fridays as Deep Work days!
• Retrospective sessions
• Daily Standups available in 2 timezones (pick the one that suits you best)
• Weekly Focused Working Groups meetings
• Weekly 1-to-1s with your manager

Process

Development

• Current development process. Keep in mind to involve Quality Assistance from the start.
• Releasing
• Backwards compatibility matters a lot, so CHWs can keep using the app and delivery care to their community without interruptions.
• It can feel slow at times, but we’re making a lot of progress here. See below about how Focused Working Groups work.
• Quality matters a lot!
• Data Flow
• Monitoring & Alerting
• The main repositories to look at:
  • cht-core
  • cht-conf
  • cht-android
  • cht-sync
  • cht-pipeline
  • couch2pg
  • cht-watchdog
• Continuous Integration (CI) with GitHub Actions
• No Continuous Deployment, as no SaaS setup
• Sonar for Code Static Analysis
• Technical resources & learning material for CHT contributors.

GitHub

• Tons of things happen here.
• Recommendation: Set up your reminders/notifications
• A few important boards:
  • SRE Engineering
  • SRE Support
  • Ecosystem Workstream
  • Allies Workstream
  • Care Teams Workstream
  • Infrastructure Workstream
  • Test Automation

Quality Assistance

• High emphasis on automation
• We moved from manual AT (acceptance testing) and release testing to fully automated
• We leverage quality assistance
  • Faster start-to-live
  • Avoiding silos and shifting of responsibilities (coding and quality).

SRE (Site Reliability Engineering)

• Support
• Ticketing system: only GitHub
• Not on-call
• We’re offline first, so not every outage calls for immediate action/resolution.

Product

CHT Forum

• We keep the forum active. It’s a great place to talk with people working with the CHT.
• Encourage teammates to post and answer questions there instead of Slack when the community might benefit
• Expecting you to be proactive and support the team with checking forum posts and helping when questions arise

Partners

• Medic-hosted
• Self-hosted
• Technical partners

Product Development Process

• At Medic, we follow Continuous Discovery as a Product Development Process
  • Trying to follow closely with the Continuous Discovery Habits book by Teresa Torres
  • Focused Working Groups within the product team to focus on specific groups of users
    • Allies
    • Care Teams
    • Infrastructure
    • Ecosystem

Technology Radars

• A Technology Radar is a compilation of technologies and their adoption status in the context of the CHT. When in doubt of using a certain technology or feature of the CHT, check the radars for their adoption status.
  • CHT Technology Radar for Contributors
  • CHT Technology Radar for Implementers.