Performance on a Budget: Lessons from Building a Nonprofit SaaS Platform

What does it take to ship a production-ready platform on a tight budget, with a team of interns and freelancers, and still care about performance—both in code and in people?

In this talk, Akshay Nair will share the journey of helping a small nonprofit team build and launch a SaaS platform designed to support career-readiness programs in public schools. From navigating performance constraints in a legacy codebase to adapting to constant developer churn, regulatory hurdles, and minimal infrastructure spend, this is a case study in getting things done without reinventing the wheel.

Rather than just focusing on metrics and optimization tricks, Akshay will talk about what “performance” looks like when the real challenges are scattered across team structure, resource limitations, and long-term sustainability. If you've ever had to do more with less, or balance people and process while still shipping, this one’s for you.

Akshay Nair is a Software Engineer at Speakhire, where he’s leading the development of a bespoke platform that supports all operations for a nonprofit organization. he specializes in software engineering for the web, and before this, he spent nearly a decade at a multinational bank building web products across multiple markets as part of the core engineering team. He’s been an attendee of this meetup in the past, and he’s excited for the chance to give back and share some of the lessons learned along the way.

We will have food and drinks and as always, we are going to have geekaways with geeky prizes provided by our sponsors.

Agenda:
6:00PM - Arrive at the venue, meet other members
6:15PM - Event starts
6:30PM - Performance on a Budget: Lessons from Building a Nonprofit SaaS Platform (Akshay Nair)
7:15PM - Q&A
7:45PM - "Books and Stuff" geekaways
8:00PM - Open Discussion, Networking

Make sure to fill out your legal name and bring your ID to show at security desk.

Interested in speaking at a NY Web Performance event in the future? Fill out our speaker application, or reach out to your organizers with any questions!