- Textbook Assignment System: Developed a comprehensive system for assigning textbooks to students, managing licenses, and tracking usage across schools and educational institutions.
- Student Analytics: Built tools to understand student struggles and performance, providing teachers and administrators with actionable insights to improve learning outcomes.
- Accessibility for All: Brought technology to users with different accessibility needs, implementing features like screen reader support, adjustable text sizes, high contrast modes, and keyboard navigation throughout the platform.
- Scale and Performance: Transformed the platform from an MVP to handle 50,000 daily users during peak school hours, requiring significant optimization and infrastructure improvements.
Octavo
EdTech Platform for Digital Publishing
RoleChief Technology Officer
Timeline2016-2022
IndustryEdTech / Publishing
TypeB2B2C Platform
Octavo is an EdTech platform that acts as the bridge between publishers, schools, teachers, students, and general readers. With a simple, intuitive interface, the platform offers multilingual content that is unique, interactive, and digital-first, with a strong sense of accessibility to cater for every reader.
As Chief Technology Officer, I led the technical vision and implementation, growing the platform from an MVP to a production system serving over 200,000 users across multiple countries.
Challenges Solved
Technical Approach
The platform was built with Angular for its robust framework capabilities and TypeScript for type safety across the codebase. GraphQL provided a flexible API layer that allowed the frontend to request exactly the data needed, reducing payload sizes and improving performance.
The infrastructure leveraged both Google Cloud Platform and Heroku, with PostgreSQL as the primary database. This hybrid approach allowed us to use the best tools for each job while maintaining cost efficiency.
Accessibility was built into the platform from the ground up, not added as an afterthought. We followed WCAG guidelines and conducted regular accessibility audits to ensure the platform was usable by everyone.
Outcomes
- 200K+ Users: Grew the platform to serve more than 200,000 users across schools, teachers, students, and general readers.
- 15x Performance Improvement: Reduced latency from MVP by 15x on average across all endpoints through systematic optimization and infrastructure improvements.
- 50K Daily Active Users: Successfully supported up to 50,000 users daily during school opening hours, handling peak loads with reliability.
- Comprehensive Accessibility: Achieved full accessibility compliance, making digital education available to students with diverse needs.
- Multi-Country Deployment: Expanded the platform across multiple countries with multilingual support and localized content.
- 6-Year Leadership: Led the technical team for 6 years, building a sustainable and scalable EdTech platform.