Core Contributors Introduction Thread!

[Dean (www.abconlinecourses.com)]

Hilarious . Small is in the name after all. I’m abroad for the foreseeable future

[ali_hugo]

@Dean

Small is in the name after all.

Haha, true!

@Dean

I’m abroad for the foreseeable future

I’m headed to Panama in a few weeks myself, so the Western Cape is going to have to get by without us!

I’m glad we’ve met. Keep well!

[sambapete (Pierre Mailhot)]

Since I am the latest Core Contributor admitted to the program, I guess it is time for an introduction.

A little intro about you - What type of Core Contributor are you? Where are you located? Who do you work with? What are some fun facts about you? etc

B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Computer Science. My master’s thesis was on the development of a visual editor for VLSI design. At the time I was mostly interested in processors and computer hardware.

I ended up doing research and managing servers for the lab where I did my master’s thesis. A few years later I moved on to managing servers for the Département d’Informatique et de Recherche Opérationnelle (DIRO) at the Université de Montréal (UdeM).

I then left the university to go work in system administration, outsourcing and security in the private sector mostly in the telecommunications and banking worlds. I am a CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional) since 2004.

I currently work for the Centre de Pédagogie Universitaire (CPU) at the Université de Montréal. Who would have thought that I would end up working for a department whose acronym is a central processing unit

I am responsible for the setup, maintenance and upgrades of the EDUlib platform based on Open edX. We are a relatively small team on the operations side but we work with a large group of instructional designers who help various faculty members develop courses for internal purposes on our Moodle platform and MOOCs on our Open edX platform.

I am also responsible for translating strings from English (en) to French-Canadian (fr_CA). Since most of our users are francophones, we have to make sure each part of the platform is available in French. As a result, I had to learn to use po and mo files, and Transifex, very early in the process of setting up our Open edX instance.

I am a huge sports fan. I personally have (or share) season tickets for the Montreal Canadiens (NHL), the Montreal Alouettes (CFL) and CF Montréal (MLS). You can definitely find me at most local games. I am also a huge racing and Formula 1 fan. Yes, I do have tickets for the Canadian Grand Prix in Montréal since 1978…

Why did you originally join the Open edX community? What motivates you to stay involved?

I joined the Open edX community in early September 2014 when an ex-colleague of mine reached out to me in order to find out if I would be interested in helping the Université de Montréal put in place an instance of Open edX for the Université de Montréal / École Polytechnique de Montréal / École des Hautes Études Commerciales de Montréal.

At the time, I didn’t know a thing about Open edX, Python, Django and other technologies involved with it. I had spent the last 13 years in a non hands-on role in security, so there was a big learning curve.

In the end, the https://cours.edulib.org instance was officially launched on May 4th, 2015 with Aspen. It is now running with Koa under Native and should be moving to Nutmeg and Tutor by the end of the year 2022. We just have a “political” payment processor issue to fix internally first.

I am still staying involved after all this time because I believe in the mission of Open edX and what we are trying to achieve with our courses at EDUlib. I met a lot of very interesting people since late 2014. It really is a community that would go out of its way to help you and attract valuable people to the community.

To my surprise, I was even recognized as a valuable part of the community at the Open edX Conference 2017 in Madrid. That is taken from slide 50 in the State of Open edX presentation. (This is a link I found to the presentation https://docs.huihoo.com/edx/open-edx-conference/2017/State-of-Open-edX-2017.pdf). Let’s just say I was very surprised to see my hear my name and see it on screen when I was taking notes during the presentation…

What are your area(s) of expertise within the Open edX ecosystem?

I am a jack of all trades. Mostly on the system administration, devops, security and translations sides. I find bugs when it is time to test the new open releases.

Here’s a fairly recent picture of me.

[Fayyaz_Ahmed]

Hi, My name is Fayyaz Ahmed and I work at edly by Arbisoft. I’m located in Lahore, Pakistan.
I love to visit mountains, mostly northern areas of Pakistan.
I joined Open edX community on the invitation of @Zia_Fazal to contribute to edX platform as a QA Engineer in making it one of the stable and extensible online learning platform and I’m part of the community since 2022.

I have contributed in test cases execution for Nutmeg, Olive and Palm. I was the test champion for Nutmeg and Olive releases.
At Ayubia Pipe line Track KPK Pakistan.