InSchool

…its attitude: our product is designed customer first. It requires high focus on UX and wowing the customer. Our goal is to innovate, have fun and above all we deliver.
…its architecture: the product was built to be cloud-based and scalable from the very beginning. The solution is deployed to AWS cloud, we scale microservices due to individual demands and we created custom scaling solution for our core functionality.
…its continuous delivery: we have a fully automated delivery pipeline and we do zero downtime deployments multiple times a day. We have immutable servers, meaning they can be easily replaced if failure happens. Liquibase takes care of all DB changes, we use session replication and connection draining, then of course acceptance tests are run against the new version.

…its data analysis: we have real time customer analytics, log aggregation, we use AppDynamics. Our goal is to keep the system as simple and as useful as possible, so we use it for feature justification and trend analysis. On top of that ,we are adding machine learning to improve usability.

…its end users: the product already covers 80% of Irish schools and we estimate that the product will be used by an additional 1 million users daily, once it is rolled out completely. The major part of our users are pupils and their parents/guardians, however administration functionality is being used intensively by teachers and administration workers. Such wide user base challenges us to create system which is super easy to use, is accessible for disabled people and survives high traffic loads.

…its opportunity to change the lives of young people: do you remember how you were showing up to school for the first class, and then just skip the rest of them, and no one would ever know? Well now parents/guardians get a text message immediately when this happens, so schoolkids don’t skip classes anymore.

…its core functionality: timetabling. It is critical for each school to plan their schedule precisely for the whole year. It has one of the most sophisticated data models we have ever worked with and it is complex in functionality, yet it has to be simple for the end user. Automated solver solves timetable in minutes or hours, instead of weeks or even months!