We are taking some time in the weeks leading up to Open edX Con 2015 to share a bit about the speakers and what they are working on. Open edX Con 2015 is October 12-13th, at Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA.
Adolfo Brandes and Florian Haas come to Open edX Con from hastexo, working with distributed and cloud technologies. They will be presenting Open Stack for Open edX: Inside, and Out as part of the Deploying and Developing the Open edX Platform track.
Tell us a bit about yourselves
Adolfo Brandes is a Senior Consultant and open source hacker at hastexo. He enjoys teaching, hacking, open source, and running barefoot.
Florian Haas is a founder and the CEO at hastexo. He enjoys managing a distributed team focused entirely on open source software. He travels too much.
What inspired you to get involved with edtech? What inspires you today?
We identified a need to provide a distributed, scalable, extensible learning platform for professional education in our industry. We found none of the existing solutions to be adequate for our own and our customer’s needs, and found Open edX to be the one that was architecturally sound and modular enough to be able to extend it to our needs, to our own and the community’s benefit.
How does working on the Open edX platform relate to what Hastexo does?
We’ve been doing professional services and training on the OpenStack Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform for almost four years. What we’re doing is enabling OpenStack users to run Open edX, and enabling Open edX course authors to use OpenStack in order to provide realistic, multi-node, distributed lab environments to course attendees.
How long have you been working with the Open edX platform?
Just over 6 months. We have been focusing largely on automated Open edX deployment on OpenStack Heat, and have authored an XBlock that acts as an Open edX – OpenStack bridge.
What will you be talking about at Open edX Con?
The talk will be about our main focus of interest: deploying Open edX on OpenStack, and expanding Open edX courses with OpenStack-based lab environments.
What excites you about the conference?
We’re excited to talk with other attendees about: the XBlock API, automated Open edX deployment, and best practices for Open edX scalability. We are also looking forward to seeing everyone and excited to be part of this community!
Will you be attending the post conference hackathon?
Yes. What will we be working on? Not sure yet. 🙂
Photo of Adolfo Brandes courtesty of hastexo, all rights reserved. Photo of Florian Haas courtesy of Lenz Grimmer on Flickr. CC-BY-NC-SA.
