About the Academy
Mission
The Open Engineering Academy teaches engineers how to build declarative, composable systems using Open Engineering principles, open technologies, and hands-on projects.
The Academy is not just documentation. It offers complete learning journeys that take learners from foundational concepts to real, working systems.
Compose → construct → behave
Open Engineering treats composition, construction, and behaviour as three distinct phases, and the academy has one course per phase:
| Phase | Question | Technology | Course |
|---|---|---|---|
| Compose | What should exist? | Crossplane | Crossplane |
| Construct | How can an agent safely build it? | Sandcastle | Sandcastle |
| Behave | What does the resulting entity do? | Pico | Pico |
Kept short: Crossplane composes, Sandcastle constructs, Picos behave. Git artifacts form the durable boundary between construction and runtime.
Where the Academy fits
Open Engineering separates responsibilities across a set of focused organizations. The Academy is the educational arm:
| Organization | Responsibility |
|---|---|
open-engineering-conventions |
Standards and conventions |
open-engineering-definitions |
Domain definitions and schemas |
open-engineering-parser |
Parser implementations |
open-engineering-rules / open-engineering-rule |
Rule definitions and implementations |
open-engineering-picos / open-engineering-pico |
Pico definitions and implementations |
open-engineering-composers / open-engineering-composer |
Composer definitions and implementations |
open-engineering-academy |
Learning materials, courses, labs, workshops, certifications |
The Academy does not define technologies — it teaches them. That keeps responsibilities clean and lets educational content evolve alongside the underlying engineering artifacts.
Site structure
- Curriculum — the overall learning roadmap across Open Engineering.
- Courses — the catalog of individual course websites.
- Labs — reusable, hands-on exercises referenced from courses.
- Resources — shared templates, assets, and conventions.
Each course under courses/ is a self-contained Quarto website. Course-level navigation, lessons, glossary, and assets live inside that course, so it can be authored, built, and published independently.
Principles
- Treat educational content as a first-class engineering artifact: declarative, composable, versioned, and machine-readable.
- Reuse labs, exercises, and shared components across courses.
- Follow a shared set of conventions for courses, lessons, labs, and quizzes so new content can be added consistently.