Back to Blog

My Journey Building Fabrio: From First Engineering Hire to Serving World-Class Universities

·12 min read·By Ibrahim Shittu
Education Tech
Startup
CAD
Career
Engineering
Personal Journey

Looking back at my time as the first engineering hire at Fabrio, I'm amazed at how far we've come. What started as a bold vision to revolutionize CAD education became a platform trusted by world-renowned institutions like University College London (UCL) and Imperial College London. This is the story of my journey, the challenges we faced, and the lessons I learned building a product that truly transforms how engineering students learn.

How I Joined Fabrio

When I first heard about Fabrio's mission to revolutionize Computer-Aided Design education, I knew I had to be part of it. Coming from my civil engineering background, I understood firsthand how crucial CAD skills are for engineers, and how outdated most educational approaches were.

The opportunity to join as the first engineering hire was both exciting and daunting. There was no existing codebase to learn, no established patterns to follow - just a vision and the responsibility to build something that could scale from zero to serving thousands of students at the world's top universities.

The Technical Foundation Challenge

Starting from Scratch

When I joined, we essentially had a proof of concept that needed to become an enterprise-ready platform. The technical decisions I made in those early days would impact everything that followed.

Technology Stack Decisions

Choosing TypeScript and NextJS wasn't just about following trends - it was about building for the future:

TypeScript: With complex CAD workflows and educational interfaces, type safety was crucial. We couldn't afford runtime errors when students were working on critical assignments.

NextJS: The server-side rendering capabilities were essential for SEO and initial load performance, especially important when universities were evaluating our platform.

  • ECS: Containerized services that could scale horizontally
  • S3: Reliable storage for large CAD files and project assets
  • RDS + DynamoDB: Hybrid database approach for different data patterns
  • CloudFront: Global CDN to serve universities worldwide with low latency

Serving World-Class Institutions

The UCL Breakthrough

  • Integration with their existing learning management system
  • Support for their unique assessment workflows
  • Compliance with UK data protection regulations
  • Scalability for thousands of concurrent users during exam periods

Working with UCL taught me the importance of understanding not just the technical requirements, but the educational context. We had to think like educators, not just engineers.

Imperial College London and Beyond

  • Advanced 3D modeling capabilities
  • Real-time collaboration features for group projects
  • Integration with industry-standard CAD tools
  • Sophisticated assessment algorithms for complex geometric designs

Each institution taught us something new about the diverse needs in engineering education.

Technical Challenges and Solutions

The CAD File Processing Nightmare

CAD files are notoriously large and complex. A single student project could be hundreds of megabytes, and we needed to support thousands of students uploading simultaneously.

Challenge: How do you handle massive file uploads without breaking the bank on storage and processing costs?

Solution: We built a sophisticated file processing pipeline:

`Student Upload → Validation → Compression → Background Processing → Optimized Storage`

  • Progressive Upload: Breaking large files into chunks
  • Smart Compression: Reducing file sizes without quality loss
  • Background Processing: Converting files to web-friendly formats
  • Caching Strategy: Serving processed files from edge locations

Real-Time Collaboration

Engineering students often work in teams, and they needed to collaborate on CAD projects in real-time.

Challenge: How do you synchronize complex 3D model changes across multiple users without conflicts?

  • Live Cursors: Students could see where teammates were working
  • Conflict Resolution: Automatic merging of simultaneous changes
  • Version History: Complete audit trail of project evolution
  • Optimistic Updates: Immediate feedback while changes sync

Automated Assessment System

Perhaps our biggest technical challenge was building an AI system that could grade CAD assignments.

Challenge: How do you automatically evaluate the correctness and quality of 3D designs?

  • Dimensional Accuracy: Checking measurements against specifications
  • Geometric Relationships: Validating assemblies and constraints
  • Design Intent Recognition: Understanding what the student was trying to achieve
  • Partial Credit Systems: Nuanced scoring for complex assignments

Personal Growth and Career Lessons

From Solo Developer to Technical Leader

  • Architect: Designing scalable systems
  • Developer: Writing production code
  • DevOps Engineer: Setting up CI/CD and monitoring
  • Product Manager: Translating educational needs into technical requirements
  • Support Engineer: Debugging issues for stressed students during exams

This experience taught me the value of T-shaped skills - being deep in one area while having broad knowledge across multiple domains.

Building for Education vs. Consumer Products

Working in EdTech taught me unique lessons:

Reliability is Non-Negotiable: When students have assignment deadlines, our platform cannot go down. Ever.

User Empathy: Students using our platform are often stressed, learning complex concepts under time pressure. Every UX decision had to account for cognitive load.

Seasonal Traffic: University semesters create massive traffic spikes. Our architecture had to handle 10x normal load during exam periods.

Data Sensitivity: Student work and grades require the highest levels of security and privacy protection.

Scaling Challenges

The Infrastructure Evolution

As we grew from serving hundreds to thousands of students, our infrastructure had to evolve:

Year 1: Single server with manual deployments

Year 2: Auto-scaling groups with basic monitoring

Year 3: Microservices architecture with comprehensive observability

Year 4: Multi-region deployment serving global universities

Each phase brought new challenges and learning opportunities.

Team Building

  • Hiring: Finding engineers who understood both technology and education
  • Mentoring: Helping new team members understand our complex domain
  • Process: Implementing code review, testing, and deployment practices
  • Culture: Maintaining startup agility while ensuring enterprise reliability

Lessons Learned

Technical Lessons

Start Simple, Scale Smart: Our initial architecture was much simpler than what we ended up with. The key was building with future scaling in mind without over-engineering early.

Observability is Everything: When serving critical educational workflows, you need to know about problems before your users do. We invested heavily in monitoring, logging, and alerting.

Database Design Matters: CAD projects create complex relational data. Poor database design decisions early on caused performance problems that took months to fix.

API Design for the Long Term: Our APIs needed to evolve without breaking existing integrations with university systems. Versioning and backward compatibility became crucial.

Career Lessons

Domain Expertise is a Superpower: Understanding education, CAD workflows, and university operations made me a better technologist than pure coding skills alone.

Communication Across Domains: Being able to translate between technical and educational language became one of my most valuable skills.

Ownership Mindset: As the first engineer, everything was my responsibility. This taught me to think like an owner, not just an employee.

Learning Never Stops: From CAD file formats to educational psychology, working at Fabrio required constant learning across diverse fields.

Business Lessons

Product-Market Fit is Obvious: When we found it with universities like UCL and Imperial, adoption accelerated rapidly. Before that, every sale was a struggle.

Enterprise Sales are Different: Selling to universities requires understanding procurement processes, academic calendars, and institutional decision-making.

References Matter: Success with prestigious institutions like UCL and Imperial opened doors to other world-class universities globally.

The Impact

On Students

Seeing thousands of engineering students learn CAD more effectively was incredibly rewarding. We received emails from students who said our platform helped them grasp concepts they'd struggled with for months.

On Educators

Professors could focus on teaching design principles instead of software mechanics. Our automated assessment tools gave them insights into student understanding they'd never had before.

On My Career

Fabrio transformed me from a developer into a technical leader. The experience of building something from scratch, scaling it globally, and seeing it make a real difference in education was career-defining.

Looking Forward

What's Next for EdTech

The future of engineering education lies in personalized learning paths, AI tutoring, and immersive experiences. Fabrio laid the groundwork, but there's so much more to build.

Advice for Early-Stage Engineers

If you're considering joining an early-stage startup:

Choose Your Domain Carefully: Pick something you're passionate about. You'll be living and breathing it for years.

Embrace the Chaos: Early-stage startups are messy. That's where the best learning happens.

Build for Tomorrow: Every technical decision compounds. Think about where you'll be in 2-3 years.

Find Great Co-founders: The people you work with matter more than the technology stack.

Final Thoughts

Building Fabrio from the ground up was one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences of my career. From that first line of code to serving students at UCL and Imperial College London, every day brought new problems to solve and opportunities to make education better.

The combination of cutting-edge technology and meaningful impact on education created something special. It taught me that the best products don't just solve technical problems - they solve human problems.

What challenges are you facing in EdTech or early-stage product development? I'd love to share more specific insights about building scalable educational platforms.

Ibrahim Shittu's profile picture

Ibrahim Shittu

Senior Software Engineer passionate about AI, web/mobile development, and building products that make a difference.

Made with ❤️ by Ibrahim Shittu