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Welcome to Seattle Flu Study (SFS) GitHub documentation! If you're reading this, you're probably new here. This page, while currently a stub, dreams of being a one-stop shop for getting you set up and answering your questions before you start using or contributing to our code.

Team philosophies

Open science

The Seattle Flu Study practices open science. This means that our code and documentation (with very few, notable exceptions) is all open source. Even though our work can be highly specific and not always applicable to the public domain, we use a "public by default" rather than a "private by default" approach to our developer material. We only privatize repositories or documentation that contain sensitive data or whose release could pose a security risk to the study or its members. Here is a quick guide to what's safe to share and what's not.

Safe to share publicly

  • Documentation that is Seattle Flu specific but not sensitive
  • Links to Slack conversations
  • Links to Trello cards
  • Links to Metabase (or other apps at backoffice.seattleflu.org)
  • First names of study team contacts

Don't share publicly

  • Personally identifiable information of study participants or employees, including full names or email addresses
  • Real study barcodes
  • Secrets
    • Passwords
    • API authorization IDs
    • API access tokens
    • deidentification secrets
    • etc.
  • Links to Google Drive (the risk is that link-based sharing could be turned on by accident for documents/folders, allowing access to anyone with the link)

Inclusion and diversity

We aim to write our documentation and code comments with inclusion and diversity in mind. We've found the Google inclusive documentation style guide to be a useful starting point for these considerations.

Slack

Slack is the primary method of communication used by Seattle Flu Study members. Our culture is to post messages in public channels wherever possible so that as much context as possible can be gained by relevant parties. We recognize that private channels are often appropriate for certain types of data-sensitive or intra-team communication, but we discourage the use of direct messages for study-related questions, requests, or planning.

An overview of the SFS slack:

  • #channel-map - organized list of broad channels and their purposes
  • #directory - study-wide directory

Noteworthy Slack channels for SFS developers include:

  • #barcodes - used for requesting newly minted barcodes. See the channel description for the upload destination for new labels.
  • #clia - used for questions about CLIA compliance
  • #data-transfer-labmed (private) - a shared channel used to communicate with UW SecureLink about data sharing
  • #data-transfer-nwgc - used to communicate with Northwest Genomics Center about data sharing
  • #data-transfer-retrospectives - used to communicate with Seattle Childrens about data sharing
  • #id3c - used to discuss the ID3C code base
  • #id3c-alerts - alert system for cronjobs that run on the backoffice server
  • #informatics - questions about SFS ID3C views or Seattle Flu Metabase queries
  • #ncov-reporting (private) - alert system for positive or inconclusive hCoV-19 results
  • #record-troubleshooting - used to communicate bad barcodes or REDCap records
  • #redcap - general REDCap questions
  • #software - software team chat, for internal team communications
  • #website - questions about the public-facing study website (currently managed by Formative)

Permissions & Access

Before you can get access to sensitive data, you must complete all required trainings and sign the confidentiality agreement. Please get in touch with the management team to complete all the necessary paperwork!

You will need access to the following:

LastPass

LastPass is a UW-approved password management tool and is utilized by SFS developers to manage individual private and team shared passwords, keys, and secret keys. More information on LastPass can be found here.

Enrolling in UW's LastPass Enterprise account requires specific steps. (Please note, order of operations here is critical! If you do not complete these steps in order, your account may not be configured correctly):

  1. Request an account through UW using your NetID. Visit this page and click "Join this group". If you do not see an option to join the group, someone will need to add you to your team's LastPass UW group (for example, uw_gs_bbi_lastpass) first. Then you can return to the link in this step and join the u_passman_users_requested group.
  2. Wait (up to 60 minutes) to receive an email from LastPass to activate your account. Follow the link in that email to reset your master password.
  3. After resetting your master password, download and install the appropriate LastPass browser extension or log in directly through the LastPass website.

After successfully logging in:

  • Confirm your account is correctly confguired with your UW email address and "Enterprise User" in the top-right corner.
  • Confirm that you have access to the "Shared-SFS" shared folder under "All Items" from the navigation menu on the left.

Responsibilities

SFS developers maintain the following codebases and apps.

ID3C

Core ID3C and its extensions, ID3C-customizations, are the repositories that contain our CLI tools, ETL pipelines, database schemas, database roles, and API endpoints.

The long term vision for ID3C's design is to create a general platform that can be used by other researchers, in other cities, for other organisms. De-coupling SFS/SCAN-specific code from ID3C and porting it to ID3C-customizations is still a work in progress.

Data ingestion

Data sources include prospective (SFS or SCAN enrollments via REDCap) and retrospective (Seattle Childrens, UW Medicine, Kaiser Permanente, or Fred Hutch data exports)

See more details about data ingestion at data-flow.

Data Quality

There are data quality checks throughout the ingestion and ETL pipelines in ID3C/ID3C-customizations. Errors and warnings are posted in the #id3c-alerts Slack channel.

See more details about how to handle common errors at troubleshooting.

Barode minting

The dev team gets requests for minting new barcodes in the #barcodes Slack channel. More detailed instructions are available at barcodes.

Return of results

CLIA certified lab results are returned to participants via a web portal. The dev team is responsible for generating PDF reports for these lab results, exporting the results and PDFs to UW LabMed, and maintaining the SCAN customizations for the web portal.

Lab Result Reports

The lab-result-reports repo contains the templates and code for generating the individual PDF reports for lab results.

Securelink

SCAN is currently using the UW LabMed results portal since their infrastructure is considered CLIA approved. The securelink repo contains the code for the results portal. The SFS dev team is only responsible for maintaining the front-end customizations for the SCAN study.

Labelmaker

Used with barcode minting.

Metabase

Metabase is an open-source, B.I. tool that is used widely across the SFS. The Seattle Flu Metabase service is documented here.

SFS Switchboard

The SFS Switchboard is an internal tool built to speed up the lab's unboxing and quality control processes for recieved SCAN kits. The source code is separate from the deployment configuration.

Tools

Git

Git is our version control tool, and our repositories are all hosted on GitHub. We generally follow these guidelines for writing git commit messages. We typically do development in feature branches and merge into master. Generally, we deploy from master (or images/snapshots created from master). Before merging, we rebase our commits to create the most human-readable history of our codebase as possible. We avoid moving and changing code in the same commit.

GitHub Actions

We use GitHub Actions in the following repositories:

Python

Python 3 is the programming language of choice for our ETL pipelines. We also use it for other tasks or services in the backoffice repo.

Pipenv

Across our codebases, we manage Python dependencies with Pipenv. See an example Pipfile here.

Flask

We use Flask to set up the ID3C web API.

Click

We use Click to set up the ID3C command-line interface.

PostgreSQL

We're currently using PostgreSQL version 10 for our production database with plans to upgrade to PostgreSQL 13.

See ID3C's design for a motivation on the schema setup of our database. See this flowchart for an overview of the warehouse schema of the seattleflu database.

Sqitch

See our motivation for using sqitch.

AWS

See our high level AWS documentation.

Tests

We currently don't have many tests in ID3C, as we tend to rely more heavily on our alert system (see the #id3c-alerts Slack channel).

Doctests

Run doctests in the ID3C or ID3C-customizations repo with pytest -v.

Type Checks

Run mypy type checking in the ID3C or ID3C-customizations repo with ./dev/mypy.

Misc

REDCap

REDCap is an online tool used to build and manage surveys for collecting information from SFS/SCAN study participants. There is a REDCap team within SFS that works with UW ITHS to build and manage these surveys. Therefore, the dev team is not immediately responsible for these surveys, but it is useful to understand how REDCap works to debug ingestion and data quality issues that may arise.

See ITHS REDCap Training to sign up for classes and/or read training materials.

The REDCap CLI can be helpful for digging into a project's data.

FHIR

To be able to better integrate with other data systems, we have begun adopting HL7 FHIR vocabulary and documents wherever possible. Our REDCap DET ETLs produce FHIR bundles that then get processed by our FHIR ETL. See some minimal FHIR bundle examples.

Development

Getting set up

Development tools

Running ID3C

Test your installation

From within the id3c or id3c-customizations repo, run the following:

PGDATABASE=seattleflu pipenv run id3c --help

Connecting to production vs. local databases

Here's how you might see the identifier (barcode) sets in our production instance:

PGSERVICE=seattleflu-production pipenv run id3c identifier set ls

whereas in local testing, I'd do:

PGDATABASE=seattleflu pipenv run id3c identifier set ls

PGSERVICE points to a named service definition in a ~/.pg_service.conf file.

ID3C doesn't provide application-specific connection defaults, and it relies on the standard Pg environment variables to define the connection.

Re-run an ETL process (without bumping revision number)

Set the processing log for all targeted rows to be blank. When any ETL, like the REDCap DET ETL, is run, it will process all rows with a blank processing log for the current revision (e.g. 12). Running the following code will make the affected rows (recieved on or after Jun 06, 2020) be picked up in a subsequent REDCap DET ETL run:

update
   receiving.redcap_det
set
   processing_log = '[]'
where
   received > '2020-06-25';

To process redcap-det, run

PGDATABASE=seattleflu pipenv run id3c etl redcap-det --prompt

To process clinical run

PGDATABASE=seattleflu pipenv run id3c etl clinical --prompt

If you don't have LOG_LEVEL=debug turned on, full logs should be available on your system via

grep seattleflu /var/log/syslog

Environment configuration

Editor configuration

We configure our editors to use spaces instead of tabs, trim trailing whitespace at the end of each line, and add an empty newline to the end of each file.

If you use VS Code, add these settings: "files.insertFinalNewline": true, "files.trimFinalNewlines": true, "files.trimTrailingWhitespace": true,

Git configuration

We add the following configuration to our global .gitconfig:

[pull]
    rebase = true

When pulling from master, local changes are now rebased on top of the master branch instead of creating "Merge branch 'master'..." commits.

Prevent wrapping within psql (optional)

Set pager environment variable to less and specify which less method to use. If there's less than a screen full of information, don't page it.

PAGER=less LESS=SFRXi psql seattleflu

To save these settings, add the following lines to your ~/.psqlrc.

\setenv PAGER less
\setenv LESS SRFXi