Payments, funding-body integration and academic tools for a university platform in Southern Africa

The problem

The platform covers a student’s whole journey, from application to graduation, for several institutions at once. Each one has its own fees, currencies, sponsors and rules, and the codebase had grown into a large monolith with about 90 plugins.

Students needed to pay through card gateways and local banks. A government funding body needed admissions, results and invoices sent to its API. And finance teams needed records they could trust, even when two people pressed the same button at the same moment.

What we built

We integrated card payments through CyberSource’s hosted checkout and extended the API local banks call to credit student wallets, so banks that send XML and banks that send JSON go through the same code. Around them we built late fees, lien refunds and safer refund references. A database lock stopped duplicate cancelled transactions when the same cancellation ran twice at once.

For the funding body, background jobs sync invoices and results to its API, with a log of every request and response that finance can filter and export. On the academic side we built revaluation requests, exam seating, class attendance, prizes on transcripts and the statistics dashboard management relies on.

Our part

Our engineers have worked inside the client’s development team for three and a half years, taking tickets from the same backlog. In that time we wrote about 29% of all commits to the main codebase. The platform, its plugin architecture and most of its earlier modules were built by the client’s team before we joined.

Built with

• Ruby on Rails
• MySQL
• CyberSource
• Delayed Job
• Docker
• Google Kubernetes Engine
• GitLab CI