Cloud in January, On-Prem in May: NStrim at SkillsLatvia 2026

SkillsLatvia 2026, organised by the State Education Development Agency, ran in two stages: semi-finals spread across thirteen vocational schools and two industry companies between 13 January and 26 February, then a national final at Rīga's Ķīpsala Exhibition Centre on 7 and 8 May, with twenty skills competing. NStrim ran the web technologies track at both ends — and the two ends could hardly have been more different technically.

January: cloud, across thirteen schools

The web technologies semi-final took place on 29 January at Jelgavas tehnikums, with competitors working a six-hour task judged by teachers and industry experts against international criteria. Six came through to the national final.

The semi-finals ran on NStrim's cloud. Each competitor worked in an isolated environment provisioned in under a minute — a personal subdomain, a Gitea repository, a database with pgAdmin, and a browser-based editor. Nothing was installed on the school's machines. That is the whole point of running a distributed qualifying round this way: a host school supplies a room and a network, not a prepared computer lab, and no competitor is advantaged by which building they happened to sit in.

May: on-premise, in an exhibition hall

Fourteen weeks later the six finalists competed at Ķīpsala as skill 12. This time nothing ran in the cloud. The final was hosted entirely on-premise, on server and networking hardware NStrim supplied and sponsored for the event.

An exhibition centre is not a data centre. Running a national final on-site means the platform has to behave identically on hardware wheeled into a hall as it does in a managed cloud region — same provisioning, same snapshots, same dashboard — with no internet dependency to be at the mercy of. That portability is the same property that lets a school self-host NStrim on its own servers; a competition final is simply the least forgiving test of it.

The task: a booking platform, built without page reloads

Competitors had to build a service booking and reservation platform. Users had to be able to register and sign in with an e-mailed code, browse and search services by category, date, location and price, see availability and free slots, book a time and receive a confirmation with a unique code, and leave a review afterwards. Organisers needed a separate view to create and manage services and to register or cancel visits. The application had to run without page reloads and follow a supplied visual design.

That is a full-stack brief with authentication, search, state and a second user role. It is exactly the kind of task where an hour lost to a broken database decides a medal — which is why snapshots between modules mattered more than any other feature on the day.

On the stand

NStrim also had a stand at Ķīpsala, directly alongside the web technologies competition area, showing the newer work to the teachers walking the floor: NStrim AI drafting a full module from a topic description, task briefs delivered to each student in their own language, and AI-assisted marking that runs the teacher's own rubric and leaves every grade to be confirmed by a human.

It turned into the more useful half of the event. Teachers and vocational schools arrived at the stand with their own problems rather than questions about ours — most often some version of "we lose the first lesson of every term to setup" — and we came away with enquiries from schools that wanted to try it with their own groups.

If you are organising a national competition, talk to us — and competition mode and live invigilation will ship in the open source edition in Q1 2027.