Rock Academy

Everything started in early February 2026. I was scrolling my Instagram feed when I came across Eliane Farmer, an influencer who was promoting Rock Academy, since the two are partners. I had been wanting to take an English course for a while and hadn't found anything, so I got interested. I also started following Eliane because I liked her content and she seemed like a humble, good person.

Through her posts about Rock Academy, I ended up finding João, the founder. I joined the English course, got into the WhatsApp group he creates to share offers, and started following him on Instagram, just because. We had no plans at all. I kept posting my own projects, he kept posting about the school, and at some point he noticed what I was building. In March 2026 we had our first real conversation, and I got along with him right away. He's a really down to earth person.

From that conversation came more conversations, and from those came a place on the team. Rock Academy is João's school, he is the founder and the vision behind it, and I'm part of the team that builds its technology. In about seven months, we built an entire new platform for a school with over 10,000 students across 37 countries. Basically a complete learning platform, fully customized for Rock Academy. Not a template, not an adaptation. A real product, from zero.

My part is on the development side, the platform and the apps. The platform has a complete admin panel to manage courses, modules and users, give and remove access, and control everything about the school. It has a live class system like Google Meet that we host ourselves. It has payments, credits, referrals, tools, announcements and AI conversation agents. And on top of all that, I published the apps from scratch on both the App Store and Google Play, with Sign in with Apple and everything that comes with shipping on two stores.

This project taught me a lot. It was my first time working with Cloudflare Stream, video streaming and CDN delivery, and it changed how I think about serving video at scale. I learned about real-time classrooms, store review processes, subscriptions and how to keep a platform stable for thousands of students at the same time.

We finished the build in October 2026 and we are now in pre-launch, a few days from the official launch. But this is not the end. I'm going to keep working on Rock Academy with João and the team, because we are real partners, and today we are literally friends. We have a lot more planned, including something bigger that we started thinking about just a few days after we began building the platform. You can read about it in Rocksby Hardware.