Braden MacDonald
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBraden MacDonald is a seasoned software developer with 14 years of experience building and shipping back-end systems from conception to production. Based in Vancouver, he combines deep hands-on coding with team leadership and mentorship, emphasizing maintainable, high-quality software. His open-source contributions include significant back-end work on the widely used Open edX platform and adding a SAML 2.0 backend to python-social-auth, reflecting expertise in education technology and identity integration. Trained as a physicist (B.Sc. Hons, UBC), he brings analytical rigor to software design and refactoring large codebases. Colleagues know him as a pragmatic engineer who enjoys tackling complex integration problems and improving developer-facing architecture. He prefers connecting only with known collaborators, underscoring a focus on trusted professional relationships.
15 years of coding experience
B.Sc. (Hons), Physics, B.Sc. (Hons), Physics at The University of British Columbia
Github Skills (11)
unit-testing10
user-authentication10
authentication10
mongodb10
back-end-development10
xbl10
python10
django10
saml10
mongodb-database10
testing10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
openedx/openedx-platform
Aug 2014 - Jul 2022
The Open edX LMS & Studio, powering education sites around the world!
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:878 reviews, 296 commits, 419 PRs in 8 years
Contributions summary:Braden's contributions primarily involve back-end development within the Open edX platform. They worked on refactoring and splitting the MongoDB support for libraries and Library XBlocks. The changes include modifications to the modulestore and the introduction of new functionality for getting, setting and deleting different types of XBlocks, and incorporating a more modular structure. The work also encompassed the addition of functionality to report the original LibraryUsageLocator in LMS analytics.
lmsopenedxbackend-service
omab/python-social-auth
Apr 2015 - Jun 2015
Social auth made simple
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:10 commits, 3 PRs, 12 comments in 1 month
Contributions summary:Braden primarily contributed to the development of a SAML 2.0 backend for the python-social-auth library. They implemented SAML authentication using the python-saml library, enabling integration with various identity providers. The contributions include the creation of core components, tests for the SAML backend, and documentation to support the functionality. These additions allow the library to offer SAML authentication as a service provider.
social-auth
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