Core Contributor Nomination - Tobias Macey

Working Groups Core Contributors
1

Hi folks. I’m opening this thread to nominate Tobias Macey (@blarghmatey) for a Core Contributor role as a Code Contributor to the following repos:

Tobias has been an active member in the Open edX community for over a decade, working in platform engineering and operations at MIT, and getting his first platform PR merged back in 2016. He is one of the foremost experts on running our platform at scale, and running it in a non-Tutor environment. If you run the Open edX platform on MariaDB, he’s the reason why that actually works. He also hosts the Data Engineering Podcast (which is not really Open edX related, but you should check it out anyway).

Tobias has 34 merged PRs in the openedx org and is involved in 87.

xqueue-watcher

Tobias is already effectively serving as the de facto maintainer for xqueue-watcher. The last ten commits on this repo are all contributions by him and includes infrastructure upgrades (e.g. feat: add ContainerGrader for Kubernetes/Docker sandboxed grading + migrate to uv by blarghmatey · Pull Request #122 · openedx/xqueue-watcher · GitHub), as well as tricky bug fixes (e.g. fix: resolve state leak between staff-answer and submission grading passes by blarghmatey · Pull Request #126 · openedx/xqueue-watcher · GitHub). It’s not an exaggeration to say that xqueue-watcher would effectively be broken without him.

openedx-search

The first PR for ADR 0001 of this repo is his, and summarizes where we are with search in our platform right now, and maps out a plan for how to move forward. Tobias has been heavily involved in search-related conversations and operational testing for some time now, and was a driving force behind the current experimental support for Typesense. Most recently, he’s in the process of contributing fixes for a Meilisearch scaling issue uncovered by @dan.wong at WGU:

Tobias is an outstanding member of the community, who continues to make critical contributions the platform. He is generous with his time and expertise, and has a deep technical understanding of the operational aspects of our platform.

Comment period: Please provide comments or feedback on this nomination before 2026-10-05.

2

Tobias? Automatic +1! :+1:

3

Long standing contributor, seen his work over the years. Two repos he’s already been known for collaborating to. Yes vote with ease.

4

:+1: from me as well.

5

Definitely +1!

6

Yes from me!

7

Yes, please. We need someone to maintain xqueue-watcher and Tobias has also already made significant contributions to openedx-search.

8

+1 from me

9

Definitely +1! Thanks for your support with the Meilisearch scaling issue.