Healthcare

Pixorize

Developing platforms and mobile apps to help people live healthier lives

About

Pixorize is a New York-based startup with an innovative visual e-learning platform that uses mnemonics to help thousands of science and medical students improve their memorization.

Pixorize’s catalog offers brightly colored interactive images and step-by-step videos to make the learning experience more enjoyable and sustainable, as well as increasing memory efficiency up to three times when compared to similar methods.

The Challenge

Enhance user experience while equally ensuring the application can support minimum security and scalability standards.

In the realm of education, visual learning solutions have steadily become more feature-rich and increasingly competitive. Pixorize needed a team to take accountability for its solution architecture redesign. The software needed to exceed industry standards to stand for a top-of-the-line solution that would reposition Pixorize’s position in the market.

As Pixorize’s first-ever outsourcing partner, we were tasked with allocating a cohesive execution unit composed of full-stack web practitioners to simultaneously deliver both frontend and backend capabilities.

The goal was to enhance user experience while equally ensuring the application could support minimum security and scalability standards.

Due to Pixorize’s accelerated growth, it was essential to team up with senior engineers who were ready to own the entire software development lifecycle from end to end. For Nearsure, this meant allocating a well-rounded team with extensive experience delivering in a virtual context, along with solid communication skills and the capability to take ownership of crucial technical decisions with minimal oversight.

The Solution

Nearsure’s consultants led the new feature development efforts, rapidly immersing themselves in the client’s culture and bonding with outer-project multidisciplinary teams, which ultimately enabled them to acquire a solid command of Pixorize’s technology platform.

The frontend development profile was accountable for:

  • Web-based new feature development
  • Implementing new designs
  • Mapping out and executing unit and E2E testing to introduce stability gains
  • Developing several internal tools, such as a WYSIWYG editor, to speed up Pixorize’s content creation and management processes
  • Codebase refactoring and supporting documentation

The backend engineer owned the:

  • Rewrite of the entire backend in NestJS
  • Planning and execution of the DB migration (from Sequelize to Postgres)
  • Refactoring and redesigning of much of the current API services
  • Unit testing for all major API endpoints

Technology Stack

Pixorize’s digital platform relies on:

  • React React
  • Redux Redux
  • Next js Next js
  • Express.js Express.js
  • Passport.js Passport.js
  • Posgres Posgres
  • Jest Jest
  • Docker Docker
  • Kubernetes Kubernetes
  • SQLite SQLite
  • Nest.js Nest.js
  • Sass Sass
  • Node.js Node.js

Enhance user experience while equally ensuring the application can support minimum security and scalability standards.

David Westfall, CTO

Results

Thanks to our team’s ability to rapidly grasp the project fundamentals, guidelines, and proceedings, we were able to:

  • Promote improvements to the software engineering process. For example, by keeping the platform’s stack running on the latest versions
  • Introduce Scrum to Pixorize’s internal teams while instilling a mindset of continuous revision and refinement
  • Help develop a sense of unity and teamwork across departments
  • Migrate the solution’s backend to NestJS to streamline product development
  • Refactor the login process, resulting in substantial performance gains such as reducing the execution lapse from 8 seconds to 700 milliseconds
  • Migrate the database from SQLite to Postgres
  • Create modularized components and versatile libraries

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