Bonjour Monde ! 
My name is Régis Behmo – you can pronounce that any way you like, but there is just one rule: the “s” is not silent. I’m French, and a couple years ago I moved to a small village in the southern French Alpes, near Briançon, after being fed up with life in the city. Living here allows me to do what I love most – no, not hacking into edx-platform (sorry), but going outdoors and having fun in the mountains. Here’s a picture of my favourite object in the whole world, my bike:
(Seriously, mountainbiking is a TON of fun. If you ever get the chance, do try it out!)
My involvement with Open edX started when I joined France Université Numérique (FUN) in 2014, as a software engineer. I came for the job and stayed because of the community. After I left FUN I kept making small contributions here and there. I also did some teaching, both online and offline, and at some point I decided that I wanted to put my courses on a self-hosted Open edX platform. However, I dreaded the native installation, so I started working on a Docker-based installation, which later became Tutor. Note that I never got around to actually porting my courses to Open edX, so you could say that Tutor was the result of an intense yak shaving effort.
Tutor was not exactly a runaway success, but at the San Diego conference in 2019 it got me invited to lobster restaurants and a pool party (thank you Abstract Gmbh!). So I figured I was holding onto something, and I decided to work full time on what was until then just a side project. That was a terrible decision of course, because that’s about when COVID19 hit the world, and there were pool parties no more. (or are there? maybe I’m just not invited)
Anyway, in late 2019, COVID was just an acronym that few of us had even heard of and the e-learning world was not yet swimming in cash. @nedbat approached me and basically told me “we need to get our sh*t together and create better Open edX releases” (not his exact words). I enthusiastically agreed, because that’s what I always do with Ned, and we created the BTR working group. I only had one condition: I would contribute to the group if and only if edX committed to producing a project changelog. Let’s just say that things did not exactly go as planned…
These days, I keep doing what I’ve always done, which is mostly solving technical problems with Open edX and expanding Tutor to address the higher levels of the Open edX hierarchy of needs. I created Cairn, an analytics solution for Open edX of which I am immensely proud (perhaps even more than Tutor itself) and I’m the maintainer of a SCORM xblock. I also do custom developments and live 1-on-1 consulting sessions for customers. I’m a fullstack engineer, but if I’m being honest with myself I’m really not great at frontend development.
I hope to meet ya’ll IRL soon!