About Skoolers

With thousands of enrollees, Skoolers is one of the largest independent tutoring companies serving University of Florida and Florida State University students. Not affiliated with either universities, they are a small group of tutors with over 10+ years of experience helping students master some of the must brutal courses students struggle through, including business finance, physics, math, and chemistry. They’ve made such a reputation for themselves that students seek out their review sessions, asking for them by name.

The task

With a library of over 10,000 videos and students hungry to devour over 10 TB worth of video bandwidth a month, Skoolers needs a solution to deliver those videos in a streamlined, cost-efficient way. The tutors also need a online discussion forum for the students, along with sharing files and review schedules.

The solution

After putting together the plan, I was able to produce a replacement solution based on Meteor, running on Node.JS servers with a MongoDB database and React powering the front-end. Vimeo hosts all of the videos, and files are hosted by AWS S3.

Development experience

I’ve assembled some dev details about the app along with my experiences in observing the app scale from 0 to 1000+ users and making heavy use of the Vimeo API.

In the process I’ve also released an open source package to help efficiently auto-scale Meteor Galaxy hosted apps, and made a number of posts about various pitfalls and lessons learned while building the app.