Last week, the Tech4Dev team met in Bangalore for our quarterly sprint, setting the stage for a period of collaboration and progress. Join us as we reflect on the outcomes of our productive sprint through the lens of the development team.

Open LLM Integration

We had a discussion with Jerome (Our AI Lead) to outline Glific’s AI/LLM trajectory. We’ve laid out a mvp roadmap aimed at integrating open LLM at the node level within Glific flows. This entails providing support for custom prompts, tailored knowledge bases, and other specific functionalities at the node level. The driving force behind our focus on node-level integration stems from Udhyam’s use case for their SBIC (Societal and Business Innovation Challenge) program.Furthermore, we engaged in design discussions to ensure that the development of open LLMs not only caters for Glific’s needs but also facilitates seamless integration for other projects.

Bigquery optimizations

In response to the escalating query costs faced by NGOs like Udhyam, TAP, and KEF due to the substantial Glific data stored in their BigQuery, there’s a need to explore and implement cost reduction measures. Shamoon and Ishan worked on this and devised a migration plan to shift existing NGOs to partitioned tables (by date). Partitioning existing tables (for new NGOs we will partition by default) will reduce the time taken to query significantly, due to relatively less data to scan and smaller indexes. Monitoring of the cost usage dashboard over the next two months will gauge the effectiveness of these optimizations.

Glific Platform Observability

The entire development team had a comprehensive session on the Glific platform observability and monitoring. Together, we reviewed the tools and platforms utilized for observability currently, identifying areas where improvements were needed. We devised a plan to address observability issues on a weekly basis, rotating responsibilities internally. Additionally, we outlined strategies to enhance our observability techniques moving forward.

Bugs Squashing

Prior to the sprint, we assigned open issues from both frontend and backend to respective developers (Akansha, Amisha, Anandu), ensuring a focused approach to bug fixing during the sprint. Additionally, new issues arose during the sprint, particularly concerning WhatsApp groups and AppSignal errors (related to platform observability). We were able to fix most of these issues and will continue fixing the rest.

WhatsApp Groups Demo

We gave a demo of Whatsapp groups to the entire Tech4Dev team. The session was interactive and there were insightful discussions and valuable feedback shared by team members, contributing to further refinement of the feature.

More on Whatsapp Groups here:

• REVOLUTIONIZING COMMUNICATION: INTRODUCING WHATSAPP GROUPS INTEGRATION WITH GLIFIC
• ENHANCING NGO OUTREACH: SIMPLIFYING WHATSAPP GROUP MANAGEMENT WITH GLIFIC

Development Policy

We covered several key areas to streamline our release processes and ensure efficient version management such as.

• We are establishing a structured release policy comprising regular maintenance releases, supplemented by hotfix releases as needed.
• Additionally, we emphasized the importance of maintaining version compatibility between frontend and backend components. Our refined release process now incorporates thorough documentation of deployment procedures for both backend and frontend and post-production checks to verify essential functionalities.
• We agreed on a systematic approach to package updates, with scheduled monthly updates for both backend and frontend packages.