Open Source at Top Hat
For the lazy TL;DR — Check out our open source projects.
What is Open Source Software? (OSS)
Open Source Software is software that anyone can modify, use, and share. With this collaborative basis, it creates a community that wants to use OSS to solve complex problems and -hopefully- improve it further.
Why is Open Source important?
“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
Open Source has made developing much easier and faster.
At Top Hat, we make liberal use of OSS, and it enables much of our technology. We are able to develop faster, better, and with less risk, allowing us to release more features. This collaborative community that shares its knowledge publicly has created an environment where experimentation and learning are made easy, thus promoting innovation.
Journey to Open Sourcing our Tools
Top Hat set out to make teaching more fun and effective. To contribute to that goal, we’ve built multiple applications, such as Top Hat Classroom, Gradebook, Marketplace, and Textbook, to help professors engage with students.
Our engineers have run into many complex problems and have often relied on the great open source community to find existing solutions.
As an example, when faced with improving search engine optimization for our Marketplace application, we implemented a scalable, isomorphic web application by leveraging React, Styled Components, and the Serverless framework. Since these open source libraries had already solved the problem of server-side rendering, it simplified the implementation of the Marketplace.
It’s imperative to keep this influential community alive and strong, which is why Top Hat has decided to give back and expand our Open Source initiative.
Open Source Initiative at Top Hat
We can’t always find solutions to our problems online. In these cases, we’ve created tools to solve these problems but up to this point they’ve only been used internally.
Today we’ve officially started to move these tools to our brand new open source portal! As this list builds up, we hope to continuously give back to open source and hopefully gain contributors to help improve our tools.
Join the Cause
We love contributors and would welcome the support. Feel free to open up PRs or join the discussion.
