Being Fearless. Being Elastic. How we use the cloud.

The cloud means different things to different people. To us, it means two things:

Being Fearless

In my previous life, I worked with large corporations with dedicated IT teams. Getting new machines for R&D, messing up their machines were all so common. This also meant: fear of bureaucracy and fear of messing up a shared system. So much of my energy would have been diverted to managing this fear (meaning, the energy lost is lost for innovative work). Now, working and defining PatchSchools Company culture, the most important decision for me has been giving my engineering team the freedom to innovate. Freedom to innovate typically translates to freedom to fail. The cloud infrastructure at PatchSchools facilitates this. If a infrastructure is messed up, just kill it and bring a new one!

Being Elastic

• Our development environment is not used during our night time. The whole infrastructure, including the cluster nodes, load-balancers and databases are brought down and terminated. In the morning, they are created anew. For a bootstrapped startup like us, this has amounted to good percent of cost saving.


• Our production environment has auto-scaling configured. This configuration helps in scaling up our business with very less expenditure for IT staff.

All in all, the cloud has increased our ability to innovate and reduced cost substantially.

We Listen. We Act. We are the PatchSchools Support!

Support makes or breaks relationships. Have you experienced any of these:

• Navigating through endless options in IVR menu just to speak with a customer service representative?


• Spoke with a totally clueless representative who keeps repeating what is in his book?


• Sent a support mail request, and got no reply for days together?


• The customer care number is always busy?

All of us must have undergone these pitiable incidents at least few times in our life. The immediate feeling which we get is, we are not being cared for. The connection and trust with the brand is broken the moment this happens.

At PatchSchools we want to give the best customer support experience. The support framework is what keeps us in ground with reality, gives access to valuable customer feedback and one that keeps us connected with the customers.

For achieving this, we have selected ZenDesk. Opening a support request is as simple as sending a mail to support-at-patchschools-dot-com. And the people handling support is not a bunch of inexperienced guys sitting with a handbook, but are the founders, engineers and partners of PatchSchools.

We take support seriously.

New Employees Handbook

Get our New Employees Handbook!

Machines never have any extra parts

I like to imagine that the world is one big machine. You know, machines never have any extra parts. They have the exact number and types of parts they need. So I figure if the entire world is a big machine, I have to be here for some reason, too.

The above quote is from the novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick. We at PatchSchools also take this philosophy of minimalism and usefulness to heart. For instance, our complete infrastructure runs on Amazon AWS. Just like our development model, our infrastructure also works only when we need it to work. Other times, it just shuts itself down. Our scripts and configurations actively identify unused infrastructure and terminates them.