How New Relic Helps Closegap Evolve their Technology Stack

At Closegap, our mission to support mental health in schools has reached new heights thanks to the dedicated efforts of Donald McKendrick, our Director of Technology. We’re incredibly grateful for Donald’s expertise and commitment, which have been crucial in our journey. His leadership has allowed us to effectively monitor our infrastructure, optimize our tech stack, and ultimately provide better support for student mental health across the country. Donald has been instrumental in leveraging New Relic’s observability tools to enhance our service reliability and performance. His work has not only improved our operational efficiency but also reinforced our mission to make a meaningful impact in schools nationwide.

Donald wrote this article to share how we’re evolving our feature development process with New Relic's help.

New Relic: Our Key to Performance and Cost Savings

Each morning, I start by reviewing our website’s core metrics on New Relic. This helps me track recent updates and catch any issues early. For instance, New Relic’s dashboards recently alerted us to an inefficient API call on every page of our site. This led us to discover outdated code that was pulling unnecessary data, which was affecting our server’s auto-scaling and increasing costs. By fixing this issue, we managed to reduce our server costs by 15%-20%, saving $1 for every $5-6 spent.

Embracing Hotwire

Our site runs on Ruby on Rails with a React frontend, but we’re building new features with  Hotwire—a framework that simplifies front-end development and could help us build a mobile app more efficiently in the future. Instead of overhauling everything at once, we’re gradually integrating Hotwire, starting with our educator dashboards. This approach lets us develop new features faster with less code, and we are monitoring the rollout with New Relic so that we maintain the performance that users expect.

Building Community and Sharing Knowledge

We’re also excited to open-source our application when the React front-end is fully replaced to encourage community contributions. Many developers are interested in the Hotwire framework, and we want to show how it can be effectively used. By sharing our experiences and inviting others to collaborate, we hope to build a vibrant developer community that shares our mission and values.

With New Relic’s insights, a clear development strategy, and a commitment to collaboration, Closegap is well-positioned to advance its tech capabilities and continue making a meaningful impact in students' lives.