April 6th, 2016
Did you know that University of Jyväskylä IT Services does a lot of in-house software development?
In this blog we will tell you about what technology choices we have made and why, how we develop software, how we utilize Open Source software and how we keep up inspiring culture in our teams.
In this article I will tell shortly about who we are and what services we have. In later posts we will dig into the interesting how.
Screenshot of our build monitor
University of Jyväskylä - facts and figures
The University of Jyväskylä is a nationally and internationally significant research university and an expert on education that focuses on human and natural sciences.
- Seven faculties
- 15 000 students
- 2600 staff members
- Budget of about 211 M€/year
University of Jyväskylä resides in the middle of Finland.
Compared to many other higher education organizations in Finland we have relatively large group of people dedicated to IT - 90 people, of which
- about 30 do IT services (network, servers, email, AD etc.)
- about 40 work at IT support and software support
- about 20 work with maintaining software and developing new software, of which about 15 are developers
Our web-based, inhouse services, some examples
- Study data system Korppi (used by all students and teachers)
- Plone CMS for our websites (80 sites, over 250 000 pages of content, 2 000 000 visitors/month), e.g. https://www.jyu.fi
- Moniviestin video publishing platform - since 2003, thousands of videos
- Koppa and Avoin Koppa LMS - integrated to Korppi and plagiarism detection
- Payment systems - over 1 M€ gross/year and about 25 000 payment transactions made/year
- TUTKA research portal
- iRODS research data store
- Multiple customised web-services
- Jybar - simple yet powerful toolbar connecting our different web based services
- ROTI - study information system
- Integrations to nation wide systems
- Migrations from legacy software to new ones
- and much more!
What's to come?
We will tell concrete examples of about
- Technology choices we have made
- Systems we have developed and maintained with relatively little amount of people
- Automated software testing, Continuous deployment
- Docker, Ansible, Gitlab
- Java, Python, C#, JavaScript, HTML, CSS etc
- Open Source
- Being Agile
- How to cope with public sector bureaucracy
- How to do integrations between different systems
- Successful (and perhaps not so successful) customer use cases
- And more
Stay tuned!