An ed-tech platform from scratch
I built BSD's development team in Thailand, and created and launched an online technology-education platform. Within 1 year the company's business model pivoted around this product.
Visit websiteThe mission
When BSD first recruited me in 2016 their business model was based on delivering in-person technology education workshops to schools in Hong Kong and Thailand. This was a successful business model but it was not scalable. The company's founder wanted to pivot the business model to deliver technology education online. The plan was to build a SaaS product along with educational content and to empower teachers to deliver technology education in their own classrooms.
I was recruited as the first member of the development team in Thailand. I handled the entire recruitment and interview process and put together a solid team of Thai and expat software engineers, QA engineers and designers. I was responsible for the development and delivery of BSD's flagship software product and was in charge of all core technical decisions. Within 1 year the company's business model and all 30 staff pivoted around this product.
Building something different...
Architecture
The BSD Online platform architecture was an impressive feat of engineering.
- Multi-region - parallel deployment to several AWS regions. We even had infrastructure in China, which had significant technical and regulatory challenges.
- Real-time monitoring and reporting
- Microservices - deployed using
serverlessframework - Real event pipeline for live monitoring classroom activities
- Role based access control for both customer-facing platform and admin area
- Multi-tenant - not just multiple client schools sharing the same infrastructure, but also several partner organisations managing their own curriculum
- Robust release management framework - using DNS to coordinate promotion of new release to production, and allowing for easy roll-back
- > 99.9% uptime
- Internationalised to 5 languages
Wearing many hats!
Starting from scratch meant that I was involved in every aspect of the building the team and developing the platform. Since the founders were based in Hong Kong I had a massive amount of autonomy and responsibility. It was an incredible learning experience for me, and this crazy word cloud really does reflect the diversity of my role:
An amazing team
It was a honour to lead such a talented team of engineers, designers, QA and support staff.