Sekolah Unggul

The Challenge

Schools don't need another single-purpose app — they need one ecosystem that runs the academic day: exams, library, assignments, parent visibility, and attendance.

The hardest engineering problem hides in one feature: computer-based testing. Exam load is not gradual — hundreds of students press "start" within the same minute, every answer must be persisted consistently, and downtime in the middle of an exam is not an inconvenience, it's a failed exam for an entire school.

The Platform

Sekolah Unggul is a multi-tenant school ecosystem serving ~500 paying students across 3 schools, plus a freemium cohort under conversion:

• CBT exams built for bursty concurrent load
• Library, assignments, and gamification for daily learning
• Parent monitoring for visibility into student activity
• RFID attendance on custom ESP32 hardware I designed and deployed

Engineering the Exam Burst

The CBT engine is designed around the burst, not the average. During exam windows it sustains ~290 students testing simultaneously — with data consistency and no downtime.

How it holds:

• Redis for hot exam state: answers and session state land on a fast path first, keeping writes consistent under simultaneous load
• Auto-scaling GCP Cloud Run: capacity follows the burst — scaled out for the exam window, scaled down after, so cost tracks actual usage
• Designed for load before it arrives: the exam window is a known, scheduled spike — the architecture treats it as the primary design case, not an edge case

Owning the Whole Stack

As founder, I own everything end to end: the backend, the cloud infrastructure, and the custom RFID attendance hardware on ESP32. It's the same operating model I ran as CTO — stay close enough to the code to make the hard calls myself — applied to a company of my own.

Where It Stands