Raising the Bar on Engineering Standards
Published: September 2025
Client Name: The Raspberry Pi Foundation, Code Club
Industry: EdTech, Education
Background
The Raspberry Pi Foundation partnered with Irysan to enhance their Code Club Projects platform, a global initiative helping young people learn and create with technology. Together, we delivered new features that improved discoverability, learner retention and engagement - while improving the platform’s engineering practices to accelerate future development.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation (RPF) is a world-renowned charity dedicated to putting the power of computing and digital making into the hands of people all over the world. Through their Code Club initiative, they provide free coding resources to clubs, schools and communities, enabling millions of young people to learn digital skills and unlock better opportunities for the future.
Challenges
The Code Club application — a Ruby on Rails backend with a React frontend — had evolved over many years. As a result, it relied on outdated React patterns and state management approaches which resulted in higher codebase complexity, slower development and onboarding, impacting long-term system maintainability.
Solution
While protecting the timeline of core deliverables, we advocated for a number of engineering changes. The first was introducing TypeScript in place of JavaScript, which carries a few tangible benefits:
Fewer regressions: TypeScript’s static type system catches many errors at compile time, which is particularly valuable when integrating with a Rails backend where API contracts may evolve. This early feedback also increases confidence and encourages refactoring among engineers.
Faster onboarding: Typescript enforces consistent interfaces and type hints throughout the codebase, reducing the learning curve and promoting effective collaboration across all levels of seniority.
Greater stability and maintainability: Easier API response validation and contract changes checks in CI/CD lead to stronger alignment between frontend and backend teams and simplify maintenance as the feature set continues to grow.
We also introduced Tanstack Query - a mature high-performance library for managing server state in frontend applications, which handles all repetitive error-prone parts of working with APIs and removes much of the boilerplate required by older state management patterns, decluttering the codebase and increasing developer productivity.
Finally, we reviewed and simplified data flows, leading with best development practices in refactoring. In just three months, while delivering new product features, we helped the team achieve a net reduction of nearly 317,000 lines of code.
Benefits & Results
The core deliverables of this engagement were a set of user-facing features that enhanced the Code Club learner experience through clearer navigation, gamified progression and personalised recommendations. Beyond the initial scope, we also reduced technical debt, strengthened developer experience and improved application robustness - all delivered within the original engagement timeline.
We have left the codebase cleaner, easier to maintain and faster to build upon than we found it, through proactive knowledge-sharing and close collaboration.
Technical impact: Improved sprint estimation accuracy, faster onboarding, increased developer productivity, and faster time-to market for new features.
User impact: A more engaging, accessible and personalised platform experience, further supporting our client’s mission to give every child the opportunity to learn to code and be creative with technology.