Empowering Future Nurses: A Case Study on YBG and NUS Technology's Long-Term Partnership

Technology Stack & Architecture

The team's strategy involved a careful evolution of the tech stack. The core backend remains Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL, leveraging their power and stability.

To address performance, AWS ElastiCache (Redis) was introduced as a critical architectural component to cache test and question data, decoupling the application from the database.

On the frontend, react-rails was used to build modern, interactive components within the existing Rails monolith. For new, standalone features like the HESI A2 module, the team adopted a modern stack of Next.js and Tailwind CSS to ensure high performance and a better developer experience.

Overcoming Technical Hurdles

The team's expertise was immediately put to the test to solve the platform's most pressing issues:

• Optimizing the "Test Creator": The 2-minute timeout was unacceptable. By performing a deep analysis and optimizing the underlying database queries and application logic, the NUS team reduced the test generation time from 70-120 seconds to an average of 3-7 seconds, a performance increase of over 95%.

• Eliminating Database Overload: To solve the test loading bottleneck, the team implemented a Redis caching layer. Instead of hitting the database for every request, frequently accessed questions and tests are served from memory. This change dramatically improved page load speeds and stabilized the entire platform, allowing it to "run smoothly to this day."

• Mastering Complex Interactions: To support all 18 question types, especially image-based drag-and-drop, the team engineered custom JavaScript solutions. This included handling image scaling on different screen sizes and creating a "click-and-drop" alternative for mobile devices, ensuring the complex functionality worked reliably everywhere.