Hi! I’m Jill, and I’ve been with OpenCraft since Feb 2016.
The best part about my job is the transparency. Almost everything we do gets contributed upstream to Open edX and related open source projects, and so our work is public and available for everyone to use and build upon. It saves our clients a lot of maintenance costs, since we don’t have to keep porting their customisations across new releases of Open edX, but I like it because it means I never have to do the same thing twice We work closely with edX Product, Architecture, Engineering, and DevOps to ensure that by the time our changes have merged, the code is about as useful and clean as it can be, which is sooo satisfying.
This transparency extends to our internal governance and communication too, so our handbook is also public, and a topic of perpetual discussion and refinement within the team. We all get to decide who we work with, what projects and roles we take on, and there’s time allocated for learning and upskilling. It’s a pretty sweet gig
Plus, every year, we get a chance to all meet up at the Open edX conference to hang out, give talks, and see what everyone in the community has been working on. So please come along and say hello!
Hi! I’m Seamus. I work with Jill at OpenCraft and have been with the team since Oct 2018.
It’s a fun place to work! Everyone works together really well and it’s always great watching us come together to solve problems for our clients. Being a globally distributed hosting provider is great: no matter what time of the day or night, we have someone who is bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to answer questions or help with perplexing situations.
Hi, I’m Samuel! I’m a new recruit at OpenCraft, having only been here for a few months. I work from Australia!
I love working here: it’s an awesome team, and getting to work on large projects like Open edX is pretty exciting. I’m also passionate about open source, computer science, and education, so it’s a great fit.
I’m Gabriel from Montreal, Canada. I handle business development and instructional design at OpenCraft. Being part of the OC team is awesome - I work on an inspiring open source project with great developers, great clients and a great community. Being all-remote has many advantages for us and for the clients, and it also means you can do pizza for lunch every day or warm up a fish casserole in the microwave without getting any disapproving looks.
When Open edX was released as open source 6 years ago, I had been an avid student of many MOOCs, including on edx.org - so I thought it was a nice opportunity to give back for what I had received from the freely distributed courses. I started contributing - including the very first (small) contribution to Open edX after it was published by edX and Stanford - which I like to brag about.
I also founded OpenCraft at that time, based on the principle that clients who need custom development, and the Open edX community as a whole, are better served when those development are contributed back to the project. The work quality has to be high to be merged upstream, and it makes it less difficult to maintain and evolve these features over time, especially when you need to upgrade. Since then, the team has grown significantly, but the spirit remains the same - we want to do good work, that both our clients and the community are happy with.
Working at OpenCraft and with this open source community is awesome!
Everyday I have something new to learn and discover and the team is really great to work with.
I’m Kshitij Sobti from India, and I have been a part of the OpenCraft team since December 2017.
As my colleagues have said, working at OpenCraft is a unique experience! I’ve been working remotely for many years now, but it’s a completely different experience working in a team with people from all around the world.
It’s also great to be working on a project like Open edX. I’ve always wanted to work on something related to education, and open source, so this is a great mix.
I’m Guruprasad from India and I have been working for OpenCraft for the past 16 months. I love working on the Open edX platform with the “open-first” and “upstream everything” approach we have at OpenCraft and am happy to be contributing the platform and the community.
I am Farhaan Bukhsh from India and I am a new recruit at OpenCraft. I have been contributing to a lot of open-source projects and the idea of “work in public” excites me. I love how software brings people together and collaborating on projects makes life a positive-sum game.
I really enjoy the community around here and would love to get involved in it on a deeper level.
We work closely with edX Product, Architecture, Engineering, and DevOps to ensure that by the time our changes have merged, the code is about as useful and clean as it can be, which is sooo satisfying.
