Spotlight On posts focus on Xojo community members. We’ll use this space to tell the stories of people using Xojo, share amazing Xojo-made apps and spread awareness of community resources. If you have an app, a project or a person you want to see featured in Spotlight On, tell us about it!
LX Aer is an AI-powered educational platform developed by student-turned-entrepreneur Leo Medvinsky. In 2020 as the pandemic forced schools to begin using remote learning tools, Leo, a student at the time, saw the gaps and the flaws in the tools he was offered and did what so many Xojo developers do, he decided to build something better. A quick view of LX Aer demonstrates it’s the solution someone who actually uses such a system would create. LX Aer is a modern take on the LMS with a user interface that centers the student and teacher. Currently, LX Aer uses Xojo Web for the backend and the project has 30,000 lines of Xojo code and growing.
10 Questions with Leo Medvinsky of LX Aer
Using Xojo Web for just the backend (web services) is somewhat surprising, tell us about that?
The LX Aer web app is designed to be the digital hub for students, teachers, and soon, administrators. The original web app was written in between 2020 and 2021 and used Xojo Web for some web service work but was mainly used the conventional way for Xojo Web pages. To increase speed and reliability as well as to improve performance, the decision was made that our next product (a standalone attendance tracking system) would be written using Xojo Web as a backend, with a Xojo iOS app and a standard HTML/CSS/JS web app to accompany it. We found that Xojo Web was a great way for us to have business logic on the backend, with great performance and amazing ease of management with Tim Parnell’s Lifeboat. When, in 2022, we were unifying this attendance system into the LX Aer suite, it was decided that the LX Aer suite would be combined into the attendance technology stack, rather than the other way around. This was a large time investment as it involved rewriting and rethinking significant portions of the existing product offering but has brought our software to a much stronger position.
What is your experience with Xojo Web performance for larger scale apps like LX Aer?
Up until recently, when we began self-hosting most things, we had two instances of the LX Aer Backend running on a Debian server in AWS with just 2 GB of RAM and performance was very good. We are actively developing solutions to allow for much greater scalability and distribution of load across not just instances (with Lifeboat), but across several different servers. Our database server runs CubeSQL, and Marco and I have been discussing ways to implement database sharding into CubeSQL to allow for greater scalability. While we are a startup without too many users right now, LX Aer needs to be able to support the thousands of users each school brings, along with all of their data requirements.
Can you tell us why Xojo was chosen as the backend and what other options were ruled out?
My first programming language was Visual Basic .NET. The original software I had was a simple quizzing application designed to help the user study for tests, but it could only run on Windows. This was a significant limitation. I (mostly) loved the syntax of VB compared to other languages I’ve worked with (Python, C++, Swift…), so I decided to try Xojo when I came across it in 2020. It was an amazing feeling to be able to write with the syntax I already knew to and make an iOS app, albeit a limited one, the same day I downloaded Xojo. Having experimented with Xojo, I started working on major projects in it very soon, and when a web development need came up, it was my go-to. Over the years, I have considered many alternatives, and many in the developer community (not Xojo’s) have discouraged me from relying on a proprietary language for such critical software, but I have never had any interest in switching. Every step of the way, Xojo has scaled with our needs.
Mac, Windows or Linux?
I flip-flop constantly between my dev machine, a Mac, and my business machine, a Surface. I tried many Linux distros on several occasions and have never been much of a fan of it as a consumer operating system.
What do you wish more people would ask/talk to you about when it comes to LX Aer?
Security. LX Aer’s tagline is “Security, Reliability, Innovation.” Notice how “security” comes first. While the Aer Intelligence™ platform offers incredible AI tools built into LX Aer to improve educational outcomes, and this is one of the largest attention grabbers, I would argue that security is our most interesting innovation. Having graduated from high school just over a year ago, I recall when I found my student data leaked online after a massive breach of PupilPath, a learning management system that my school used at the time. I also recall the school I transferred to for my senior year and the software they used, Genesis, which allows a user to view their own password in plaintext after logging on. This, among other things, motivated me to always put security first. In 2023, we launched LX SecurShield™, which provides encryption for student data WITHOUT storing keys on the server, while still allowing a user to seamlessly log on from any device, without any of the hassle typically associated with client-side encryption. LX SecurShield™ is truly unique and is something I wish more people took an interest in.
How would you explain your most recent project to a 5-year-old?
LX Aer is creating an AI chatbot that will help teachers teach and students learn!
What’s next on your “Learn Next” list?
Tough question… maybe French?
What programming moments made you think “Wow, I love my job so much”?
I’ve always been technically minded, but I have seen it as a means to an end, rather than the end itself. I never wrote code for the sake of writing code. I always had a long-term project in mind. LX Aer has been a project of mine for over 4.5 years, and has changed immensely from March 2020, when it first began. Consequently, the programming moments that made me think how much I love my job were when I was able to finally push an innovation over the edge into a working state. When I was developing LX SecurShield™, it required significant portions of LX Aer to be rewritten to support the new encryption. After developing a proof of concept, I worked almost nonstop for close to a week to develop it into a usable and stable state, with several all-nighters along the way. At the end of it all, I thought, “wow, I love my job so much, even with all the craziness associated with it!”
What is something that has surprised you about coding in the last 10 5 years?
10 years ago, I was 8 and had no experience writing code ☺ (though I was still the go-to tech support for my friends/family). This is a tough question, but if I had to pick it would be the difference in writing code for someone else vs. writing code for your own company. Writing code for someone else is 1,000x more difficult than writing code when you’re your own boss. As for something in the industry itself, I am always surprised by the tendency of web developers to jump around from platform to platform… Angular, React, etc. It just fascinates me.
What is a piece of software more people should know about?
To those in the Xojo community writing a web service, I cannot recommend Tim Parnell’s Lifeboat and Marco Bambini’s CubeSQL enough. To anyone working with cryptography, Björn Eiriksson’s Einhugur plugins are just incredible!
To people in general, I think it would be great if more people knew about Proton. They’re a Swiss company that develops mail, cloud storage, calendar, VPN, and password storage software, all of which uses client-side encryption and is easy-to-use. They were my inspiration for LX SecurShield™.
What’s something you worked on recently that you are excited about?
It would be somewhat cliché to say that I am excited about AI (Aer Intelligence™), but I am. Especially in the EdTech industry, I see so much potential for it to improve educational outcomes and make lives easier for overworked teachers. With our software having won the Pitchfest award at the prestigious Future of Education Technology Conference this year, I believe, largely because of our AI capabilities, I think it isn’t just the LX Aer team that’s excited about AI in education.
Thank you to Leo Medvinsky for answering our questions. If you want to learn more about LX Aer visit https://www.lxaer.com/. To all those in the Xojo community, as a token of gratitude, Leo is offering a free license until December 31st, 2024. Email sales@lxaer.com and say that you’re part of the Xojo community! “Although I have not been very active in the Xojo community in terms of engagement,” Leo says, “without the exceptionally great resource that is the Xojo Programming Forum, as well as the software and plugins made by those in the community, such as Tim Parnell, Marco Bambini, Christian Schmitz, Björn Eiriksson, and Sam Rowlands, none of this would have been possible.” See the full LX Aer Xojo community credits at https://www.lxaer.com/credits.