Education Systems for 2M+ Citizens

Context & Challenge

UNOIT built and operated education management systems that served municipalities, schools, and institutions across Denmark. The platforms handled everything from student enrollment and grade management to communication between parents, teachers, and administrators.

The challenge was maintaining reliability and performance at national scale while continuously adding features that served diverse stakeholder needs — from government officials to teachers to parents — without compromising on data security or system uptime.

Approach

Working across the full stack, I contributed to both new feature development and maintaining the reliability of existing systems:

• Large-scale Rails codebases: Working within a mature Rails monolith that needed to support millions of users while remaining maintainable and evolvable.
• Stakeholder collaboration: Balancing feature requests from municipalities, schools, and end users while maintaining system integrity.
• Performance optimization: Ensuring pages loaded quickly and systems remained responsive even under heavy load during peak times (e.g., enrollment periods).
• Incremental improvements: Learning how to operate and evolve large systems in production without big-bang rewrites or risky transitions.

Results & Impact

The platforms I worked on became critical infrastructure for Denmark's education system. The work contributed to a growing, profitable business that was eventually acquired by EG — a validation that the product and technology were built to last.

Beyond the business outcome, this experience taught me how to build and operate systems at national scale, balance complex stakeholder needs, and keep iteration speed high even in large, mature codebases.

Key Takeaways

• → National-scale systems require different thinking than startups — reliability, security, and long-term maintainability matter more than rapid feature churn.
• → Working in public sector teaches you to navigate complex stakeholder needs and translate messy requirements into clean product experiences.
• → Large Rails monoliths can scale and remain maintainable if you respect boundaries, test well, and resist premature abstraction.
• → Contributing to systems that serve millions of people is deeply rewarding and teaches you to think about impact beyond just code.