Wizenoze

The company

Wizenoze is an ed-tech scale-up based in Amsterdam. It set out to give students a safer and more educational way to find things than general search engines and content services: material matched to their curriculum and pitched at their reading level.

I was its CTO from July 2014 to April 2021, working from Cape Town and Amsterdam, and ran the full product development cycle.

The role

• Recruiting, managing, leading and mentoring the development team.
• Architecture and design guidance for the team, while still building full-stack services myself in Java, Groovy and Spring, with React/Redux and RiotJS frontends.
• API design, and the distributed systems on AWS.
• CI/CD automation and DevOps.
• Buy, build or partner decisions on technology.
• Product development from the users all the way down to the hardware.
• Technology and business strategy.

What we built

• A web crawler, first on Apache Nutch and then on StormCrawler, collecting content from the open web.
• A service-oriented platform of APIs that carried every frontend and product, and the APIs customers integrated with.
• Web for Classrooms, a search engine over human-curated websites, crawled and classified with machine learning. Elasticsearch and custom-tuned ranking brought back the most relevant educational content for students.
• Wizeup, which matched content to mapped curricula across primary, secondary and vocational education, and delivered it through APIs, SDKs and standalone web apps at the right place and the right time.
• WizeNote, a content editor that used machine learning and NLP to guide writers in adapting text to lower reading levels.
• The delivery pipeline: full CI/CD on Jenkins, Docker and Elastic Beanstalk, with Sentry for errors and Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring and dashboards.
• Data analysis pipelines in Kibana and Klipfolio.
• A run of MVPs along the way.