Organizing the daily life of
more than 100.000 Austrian students

Valentin Slawicek, CTO at Studo, "the app for your studies", manages a team of 8 and is building a platform with constant growth using a mix of technologies like Kotlin and MeteorJS.

Who are you? What's your background?

We are a group of 8 students from different areas (mostly IT) and we develop "Studo – Die App für dein Studium" (which translates to "Studo – the app for your studies"). We love: coding, startups, parties and everything which comes with the student life :D We founded our company (Moshbit GmbH) last year: An app design & development company.

What do you do at Studo?

Studo is an app for Austrian students to manage their studies online. What's special about our app? It is a web-browser-app optimized to visualize the website of the universities! This means: We re-render different HTML sites (by the way this is performed on Scalingo) and optimize them for mobile devices. Additionally we offer a wide variety of services which can be accessed by students: daily lunch menus around the uni, e-mail, university news, moodle, job offers,…

How does the Studo story started?

I started my studies in 2013 at the Technical University Graz, Austria (Information and Computer Engineering). All students use an online system of the university to check their grades, view their calendar or look up where a lecture takes place. In my third semester I wanted to buy a math script from a professor. It took me on my mobile phone about 5 minutes to figure out in which room of the quite big math-building at the university the professor has his office. This user experience didn't feel like 2014! So immediately after buying the script I took my bike, went home and started building an app (just for me) that helped me manage my daily needs at the university. As my colleagues wished to have such an app too, I published it to the store. The message of an app for the university spread not just across our campus, but reached also other universities where students requested an app too. So I ended up with 8 apps for various Austrian universities. Soon after a friend of mine helped me porting the Android app to iOS, he is now one of the co-founders of our company.

Since 2016 we started merging the various apps to one single app (Studo - The app for your studies), and support now almost every Austrian university. We currently have 7k monthly active users, and expect it to be about 80k at the end of the year.

What are you doing with Scalingo's platform?

We host two projects on Scalingo:

1. The already mentioned re-rendering of HTML sites. Our HTML parser is written in Kotlin (JetBrains new language for the JVM), and communicates through web sockets with the mobile clients. The applications is extremely multi-threaded, with hundreds of concurrent threads. Thanks to the Scalingo dashboard where we check CPU, Memory and network usage, we know that this is not a performance killer.
2. An administrative backend (written in JavaScript by using Meteor & React) for our news and lunch platform. We use the Scalingo provided MongoDB as database.

Admittedly we first wanted to use Google Cloud Services (AppEngine) for our HTML parser platform. However the European laws of privacy-protections needs us to host our service on an server which is located in Europe and is owned by an European company. We go a no-risk strategy when it comes to security and privacy protection – therefore we were happy to have found Scalingo as our hosting partner!

By the way, Kotlin is perfectly supported on Scalingo, you might add it to your supported technologies page ;)