Open edX - Quick Tip - Clearing LMS Cache

A quick tip that I discovered when working with the LMS on devstack. I would make changes in the Studio but they would take forever to show on the LMS. Restarting the memcached container did the trick: docker restart edx.devstack.memcached You will need to sign back into the LMS, but...

Open edX - xblock - Author View

Quick tip: If you want to show an author_view for your custom xblock in the Open edX studio, you need to add a field to your Python file called has_author_view. class CodeEditorXBlock(XBlock): has_author_view = True This will cause the author_view method to be fired when showing the xblock in the...

Elbow Pain

About 5 weeks ago, I woke up with severe pain in my right elbow. To be honest, I still have no idea what caused it. I do not recall banging my arm/elbow nor do I recall tweaking it the day before at the gym. The area that was in the...

Open edX - Bulk Email

One of the items I need to investigate with regards to Open edX is the bulk emailing functionality it offers. There is an enormous amount of research that indicates that weekly updates/announcements from staff have a significant effect on whether students will complete an online course. This makes the bulk...

Beat the Bank - Book Notes

I was lucky enough to be given a copy of Beat The Bank by Larry Bates as a Christmas present from my wife. I added the book to my wish list after listening to an interview with Larry on the Canadian Couch Potato podcast. The book was a very fast...

Open edX - Devstack - Viewing logs

This is a hint for debugging the devstack installation of Open edX. I ran into a problem where I was recieving a "Connection Reset" error whenever I was trying to browse the LMS at http://localhost:18000/. By running the following command you can see the logs entries being generated for the...

Open edX - Installing and Configuring Devstack

After a few starts and stops, it appears that I will be starting to work with the Open edX platform for my next project. Part of learning a new platform is documenting EVERYTHING. I want to make sure that I always have a copy of my notes, so I've decided...

Everyday Millionaires - Book Notes

Below are the notes I took while reading Chris Hogan's book Everyday Millionaires: How Ordinary People Built Extraordinary Wealth―and How You Can Too. To be honest, I was not thrilled with the book. It felt like a summary of Dave Ramsey's The Total Money Makeover. I wish the book had...