Informed K12

We are building a workflow and reporting platform that has to be powerful enough for support hundreds of unique approval processes in a school district but easy enough for anyone, from the Chief Business Officer to a school site office manager, to use. Our users work at all levels of the district in district office departments ranging from finance, payroll, HR, custodial services, transportation, food services and more. They also work at individual school sites as principals, teachers, substitutes, counselors, and even parents. To meet the needs of this wide variety of users, there are thousands of unique forms and processes on our system that span from new hire packets to student injury reports to bus services requests to permission slips. Our backend models need to be flexible enough to support a wide variety of use cases but structured enough to allow for scale and data retrieval across the entire system. Other technical challenges may relate to: Data security and privacy, as our forms may collect sensitive information Customized bulk data exports in a variety of formats (csv, pdf, zip) Seasonality and spikes of system usage - 1/3 of our total traffic for the year occurs in the rush up to the start of the school year, in August and September Finally, because our districts rely on us for their critical processes we must ensure our system is reliable and stable. The team understands that working code is not enough and a primary component of an engineer's job is to improve the maintainability of the long-term structure of the system.Quick state of the businessThe company is doing well! In 2020 we got to 135% of our yearly sales target by October, and since then we're continuing to sell very well. We’re a growing company, looking to continue doing so sustainably and responsibly, and are in it for the long haul.How we build itAs a platform we focus on the needs of school districts in aggregate. We don’t build custom features for single schools, rather we learn what are things that can help every district. Additionally we don’t try to “disrupt” how school districts work, we meet them where they are. By partnering with our district staff and administrators on critical processes they manage day to day, we work with them over multiple years and are eventually able to bring about organizational and cultural change together. Making sure that we are building things that districts need means that we do a lot of product research before we start on something. We build things deliberately and intentionally as our districts need a consistent and predictable platform. We make sure we spend the time to deeply understand the needs of our users across all levels of the district. Our platform does a lot of complicated things so we try to limit complexity to where it is needed. Similarly we try to use technology that is mature and focus on effectiveness over current trends. Our platform is built on a Rails monolith with 100% unit test coverage as well as integration testing for the “happy path” (all tests run in ~7 minutes on CI). With a small team we try to automate what we can while writing clean readable code with great commit messages. It’s not a perfect codebase! But it does some important things very well.Our StackRails 6.0, Postgresql, Typescript (React/jQuery/Vanilla), Sass CSS, Sidekiq, Circle CI, Heroku, Github