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Alex Chen

Infrastructure engineer with 9 years in higher-education IT. Started out as a sysadmin at a mid-sized regional university, maintaining a bare-metal Moodle deployment that the previous team had built on PHP 5.4 — and hadn’t touched since. Spent three years dragging that stack, screaming, into the container era.

Since then I’ve led LMS migrations for four institutions, ranging from 800-student vocational colleges to a 28,000-seat research university. The migrations were messy. A lot of things broke. I started writing about the specifics because I kept finding the same documentation gap: tutorials that tell you what to run, but not what happens when it doesn’t work.

That migration work pulled me into LMS selection too. Once you’ve run several platforms in production, organizations start asking which one they should actually buy — so I’ve spent years evaluating and comparing learning management systems (open-source and commercial) for teams across corporate training, customer education, compliance-heavy industries, and higher ed. The buyer’s guides I write here come out of that hands-on comparison work, not a spec sheet.

I’m not affiliated with Moodle HQ, Instructure, or any LMS vendor, and I don’t take payment for favorable coverage. The opinions here are based on what I’ve broken, fixed, and compared in production.

Current focus: reducing the operational overhead of self-hosted EdTech through better Docker orchestration, automated monitoring, and — slowly — less YAML.

Posted by Alex Chen