Why We're Building Education Technology the "Hard Way" (And Why That's Actually the Easy Way)

By Hawke Robinson, CITO, Practicing Musician SPC
*September 23, 2025*

After 45 years in technology, I've watched countless companies burn through millions (billions in the aggregate) trying to reinvent wheels that already exist. Not long ago, I reviewed a competitor's failed attempt to build what we launched in six weeks  and less than $20,000 USD — they spent three years and $30+ million, and they still couldn't deliver. This isn't about being better-funded, or event smarter; it's about the wisdom of understanding a fundamental truth that most of the tech industry refuses to accept: in the 2020s, 90% of what you need has already been built.

 The $50 Million Mistake Everyone's Making

Here's what keeps me up at night: watching educational institutions pour resources into building platforms from scratch or locking themselves into expensive SaaS solutions when (much) better alternatives exist. The YMCA's recent technology initiative perfectly illustrates this problem. Their in-house build projection? $65 million over three years. The SaaS alternative they considered? $53 million. Our approach using open source and proven methodologies? $18.2 million. That's not a typo—we're talking about a 72% cost reduction while delivering superior functionality.

But cost is just the beginning of the story. What really matters is the strategic advantage this approach provides. When you control your technology stack through self-hosted open source solutions (on-prem, multi-cloud, or hybrid), you're not just saving money—you're buying freedom. Freedom to innovate, freedom to scale, freedom to pivot when the market demands it.

 The Methodology That Changes Everything

Let me share something that might sound counterintuitive: the more technology advances, the less custom code you should write. Back in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, building from scratch made sense because the tools didn't exist. Today? If you're writing more than 10-20% custom code for most projects, you're probably doing it wrong.

Our approach at Practicing Musician S.P.C. follows a variation of the 80/20 rule - or very often, the 90/10 rule. We leverage existing open source platforms for 90% of our functionality and focus our development efforts on the 10% that makes us unique, our "secret sauce". Anyone can acquired these ingredients, but our experience, research, and know-how creates something far better than the sum of its parts, in a fraction of the time and cost. Think of it like sculpting: instead of gluing together individual grains of sand to create a statue, we start with blocks of marble that are already 90% of what we need and just chisel away the excess rough edges, smoothing it out to perfection.

This isn't theoretical. At cotnent-providers and fan-supported streaming company, I single-handedly built an enterprise-class subscription, advertising, transactions, hybrid, broadcast and over-the-top (OTT) streaming platform in six weeks for under $20,000, with a 100% bug-free 1.0 production release. Our Hollywood competitor had already burned through $3 million and a full year with nothing to show for it. By the time they finally launched 3 years later (disastrously), they'd spent over $30 million. During that same time, as we grew rapidly, we launched three major versions (1.0, 2.0, and 3.0), all bug-free, for less than $100,000 total development costs, while the Hollywood company went out of business.

 Why "Eating Our Own Dogfood" Isn't Just a Cute Phrase

There's a reason companies like Google, Amazon Web Services, and Cloudflare insist on using their own products internally before releasing them to customers. It's called "dogfooding," and while the term might sound silly, the practice is deadly serious. When you force yourself to live with your own technology choices every day, you discover problems your customers would find sooner or later — _before_ they find them.

At Practicing Musician S.P.C., we don't just build educational technology platforms; we run our entire operation on the same technology stack we're delivering to partners. Every video conference meeting, every collaborative document, every piece of content creation happens on our platform. This means when something doesn't work smoothly, we feel it first. When there's an opportunity for improvement, we see it immediately.

This approach has led to some remarkable achievements:
- Over the years, using this approach, I have scaled real-time audio/video classrooms in robust Learning Management System (LMS) platforms to support 60,000+ concurrent users per second
- Achieved 99.999% uptime (that's less than 5 minutes of downtime per year)
- Reduced infrastructure costs by 90% while improving performance
- Scaled data responsiveness and capacity 2,000% in just weeks
- Launched multiple products with zero post-deployment bugs

 The Open Source Advantage Nobody Talks About

I have many criticisms of Microsoft, even as an MCSE since 1998 (shockingly still very applicable to their cloud under the hood), here's what they understood when they made open source training mandatory for all of their staff: when you embrace open source, you're not just getting free software—you're getting the combined expertise of thousands or even millions of developers and testers. Every major open source project represents decades of collective problem-solving that you couldn't replicate with a team of hundreds.

But there's a critical distinction between using open source and contributing to it. Too many companies treat open source like a free lunch, taking without giving back. We take a different approach. When we benefit from a community's work, we contribute back—whether through code contributions, documentation, or financial support. This isn't altruism; it's strategic investment. The stronger these communities become, the better our foundation becomes. The folks at 8x8 get it, with their model supporting Jitsi commercially, mandating their paid staff spend time supporting the open source community, it benefits their primarily SaaS model.

Take our video conferencing infrastructure as an example (in part built on Jitsi). By building on established open source platforms and contributing our improvements back, we've scaled to support 20,000+ concurrent users at live global conventions. Where Discord and Zoom were crashing under the load during COVID, our platform never went down. Not because we're geniuses, but because we're standing on the shoulders of giants and helping them grow taller.

 Building The Practicing Musician and ClimbHigh.AI Platforms: Proof in Practice

Everything I've described isn't just philosophy—it's the foundation of how we're building the ClimbHigh.AI platform. While others are trying to create monolithic, proprietary systems, we're assembling best-in-class open source components and focusing our development on what makes us unique:
- the Instructional Design Generator that uses AI to create course structures and auto-populate multiple Learning Management Systems dynamically, saving instructors hundreds of hours per year, so they can focus on what they love doing, teaching.
- and the Community Educator Collaboration Process that enables community content providers to build on each other's work,
- and the Community Content Full Attribution System, in the style of open source, using Blockchain, AI, and other technologies, to make sure all contributors and their contributions are fully tracked and accredited

This approach has already delivered results that speak for themselves:

- 2,000+ educators engaged across 46 countries
- 7,500+ educational resources created
- Video content production costs reduced from $1,500 industry average to $5 per piece
- Partnerships with major organizations including YMCA, Girl Scouts of America, the America 250 Project, and others

But what excites me most isn't what we've built — it's what this foundation enables. Because we're not locked into proprietary systems or bleeding money on unnecessary development, we can focus on what actually matters: empowering educators, improving learning outcomes, growing and giving back to the communities, being part of the rising tide that lifts all boats, and humanity.

 The Future Is Already Here

After decades in this industry, I've learned that the biggest breakthroughs don't come from writing more code — they come from writing less code. They don't come from building higher walls around your technology — they come from building bridges to existing solutions. They don't come from treating software as a service you rent — they come from treating it as a capability you own.

The educational technology landscape is ripe for transformation, but not through another proprietary platform or another SaaS subscription. The revolution will come from organizations willing to embrace open source, contribute to communities (not just take), and focus their innovation on what truly makes them unique.

At Practicing Musician S.P.C., we're not just building another EdTech platform. We're demonstrating that there's a better way to build technology — one that's more efficient, more reliable, and more sustainable. We're proving that by doing things the "hard way" (self-hosting, open source, dogfooding), we're actually taking the right path, which happens to actually be easier, to long-term success.

 Join the Movement

If you're tired of watching educational institutions waste millions (or billions) on redundant development, or getting locked into expensive proprietary vendor-lockin or inflexible SaaS contracts, let's talk. If you believe that technology should empower educators rather than replace them, we should connect. If you understand that the future of EdTech isn't about building everything from scratch but about intelligently assembling and improving what already exists, you're our kind of partner.

The question isn't whether this approach works — we've proven it does, repeatedly, at massive scale. The question is whether the EdTech industry is ready to abandon its expensive old habits and embrace a methodology that's been proven across every major technology success story of the last two decades.

The tools exist. The communities are thriving. The methodology is proven. All that's missing is the courage to do things differently.

*Hawke Robinson is the Chief Information and Technology Officer at Practicing Musician SPC and ClimbHigh.AI, with over 45 years of experience in technology leadership. He has successfully scaled startups, SMBs, and FORTUNE Global Enterprises with platforms to support 60,000+ concurrent users, managed budgets exceeding $36 million, and achieved multiple zero-bug production launches.*

Connect with me on LinkedIn to continue this conversation about the future of educational technology.