Calen Pennington
Senior Software Engineer at Datadog
Arlington, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inDjango Web Development and E-commerce Platform
Calen Pennington is a Senior Software Engineer with 16 years of experience building backend systems, deployment tooling, and performance-sensitive Python infrastructure. He has led architecture and engineering teams at edX and OneStudyTeam and is currently at Datadog, combining hands-on coding with platform-level design. His open-source contributions span widely used projects like Open edX (LMS, ecommerce, XBlock) and performance work in astroid for pylint, reflecting deep experience in Django, DevOps/Ansible, and Python tooling. Calen’s work often focuses on pragmatic optimizations—indexing models, caching inference results, and refining deployment pipelines—to improve reliability and maintainability. Based in Arlington, MA, he pairs academic foundations from Cornell with a track record of moving large education platforms from legacy to modern, production-ready systems.
16 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelors Computer Science, Bachelors Computer Science at Cornell University
Stackoverflow
121reputation
352kreached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (48)
parserator10
api-rest10
caching10
docker10
parser10
static-analysis10
data-service10
python10
back-end-development10
api-design10
restful-api10
django10
amazon-elasticsearch10
configuration-management10
indexing10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
openedx/edx-platform
Mar 2012 - Mar 2021
The Open edX LMS & Studio, powering education sites around the world!
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:39 reviews, 2765 commits, 742 PRs in 9 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Calen contributed to the edX platform by implementing and modifying back-end features. Their work involved improving user profile links, refactoring code with CourseKey objects, removing unused imports, and refactoring legacy functionality for ORA grading. The user's changes primarily focused on improving the codebase with quality and style improvements.
edxlmssitesbackend-serviceopen-edx
openedx-unsupported/ecommerce
Dec 2015 - Dec 2020
(Deprecated) Service for managing edX's product catalog and handling orders for those products
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:15 reviews, 230 commits, 215 PRs in 5 years
Contributions summary:Calen primarily focused on enhancing the `ecommerce` service's backend functionality. Their contributions included adding indexes to models for improved Django admin performance, making status fields choice fields, and adding a management command to import LMS user IDs. Furthermore, the user updated various settings, including a throttle rate and logging, to ensure a better service operation. The commits reflect a focus on optimizing the data model and improving system maintainability.
djangoedxproduct-catalogbackend-servicehandling
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