More Than 15 Years of Building Together

If you ask anyone on our team what we've been doing with DreamBox Learning (now part of Discovery Education) for the past fifteen years and you'll most likely get a different answer. Someone will tell you about accessibility.

Someone else will talk about assessment or reporting. Others will remember late-night releases, hackathons or the first AI workflows. They'd all be right.

When you've spent more than a decade helping build the same product, you stop thinking in terms of projects. You remember the problems you solved, the people you solved them with and the ideas that slowly turned into features used by thousands of students.

That's the story we want to tell.

It Started with One Engineer

Back in 2010, DreamBox Learning looked very different than it does today.

The team was smaller. The product was still evolving. Like every growing software company, there was always another challenge waiting around the corner.

Anton Zhelyazkov joined to help solve engineering problems, but there was never just one thing to work on.

One week it was backend systems. The next it was reporting. Then student-facing experiences. There wasn't a grand plan to learn every corner of the product - it happened naturally. One challenge led to the next, and over time that meant building something much more valuable than technical knowledge.

It meant building context.

Not just understanding how individual systems worked, but why they worked that way. How one decision affected another. What mattered to teachers. What frustrated students. Where the product had been - and where it was trying to go.

Looking back, that context became the foundation for everything that followed.

“The best engineering partnerships don't happen when one team builds and the other reviews. They happen when everyone shares responsibility for building the best product possible.”

- Anton Zhelyazkov, Founder & CEO of Algorithmity

Trust Is Built One Decision at a Time

When you've been around for long enough, people stop introducing you as "the external team." It’s not really a conscious decision - it’s something that simply stops being true over time.

The conversations become different. Instead of being handed requirements, you're discussing different ways to solve the problem. You're asked what you think before a decision has been made. You're included in conversations that don't have tickets attached to them yet.

That's not something you should expect or ask for, and it's certainly not something you can put in a contract.

It only happens over time, when people know how you think, how you work and, most importantly, that you're trying to do what's best for the product - not just mark tasks as done.

We Didn't Set Out to Build an Agency

By 2019, it was clear that what had started with one engineer had grown into something bigger. The product was growing, the challenges were becoming more complex, and we saw an opportunity to build a team around work we already cared deeply about.

And that's how Algorithmity came to life.

We didn't set out to build an agency. We set out to build a team.

And we mean that in the fullest sense of the word: people who work towards a common goal, learn from one another, take responsibility beyond their individual tasks and care about the outcome as much as the work itself. People who can challenge each other's thinking, rely on each other when things get complicated and take pride in what they build together.

Looking back, that idea shaped more than how we work. It shaped the kind of company we wanted to build - one where good engineers can do meaningful work, grow alongside the people around them and see the impact of what they create.

Why the Work Matters

People sometimes ask why we've stayed with the same product for so long.

The answer isn't the technology - it's what the technology is for.

Education has a way of putting the work into perspective. Behind every feature is a teacher trying to reach their students, or a child who's figuring something out for the first time. Some students need a different way into a subject; others need more support to get there. The product has to work for all of them, and that makes the details matter.

Of course, we still get excited about solving a difficult technical problem or finding a better way to build something. We're engineers, after all. But there's something especially rewarding about knowing that the thing you're working on might help a teacher do their job a little better, or make learning more accessible for a child who needs it.

That's what makes this more than a long-running engagement. We care about the product, we believe in its purpose, and we want to help make it better. After all these years, that part hasn't changed.

One Partnership with many Stories.

Over the years, the work has taken us into some very different corners of the product, from making learning more accessible to exploring new ways of using AI. Some challenges were highly technical; others started with a much simpler question: how could we make this better for the people using it?

What connects them isn't a particular technology or area of expertise, but the way we approach the work: understanding the problem, thinking through the options and finding a solution that makes sense for the product and the people it serves.

Fifteen years later, this partnership is still evolving - new ideas, new technologies and new challenges keep changing the way people learn. That's what makes this work interesting - and it's why we're still excited to be part of it.