Wise

Shared reading lists for teams

Wise is a company I co-founded with Tim Howard through Front Row Ventures.

Wise has been through three major iterations. The first was a Twitter only version where organisations could create a shared reading list for their team. Wise would record what a user had read and this could be used towards their accreditation.

The second iteration of Wise enabled organisations and companies to create a culture of continuous learning. Targetting associations of certified public accountants we launched an iOS app, Android app, Ruby on Rails API and a Ember.js web application. The mobile applications were for end users while the Ember.js application was for learning adminstrators to curate reading lists and analyse reports. Wise would record articles users read and track this against their reading goal. In addition we developed an recommendation engine which would analyse and classify articles shared through Wise and recommend other relevant articles to list administrators.

The third and current iteration of Wise is a Slack only shared reading list. We took the basic elements from the previous version and simplified it to create an easy way for teams to share interesting articles.

I developed the first version of Wise as a Ruby on Rails application which connected to Twitter for authentication and the streaming API.

For the second version of Wise I developed the iOS application in Swift, the API in Ruby on Rails and the adminstrator dashboard in Ember.js. The recommendation was a combination of Ruby and Python as there was better support for article ingestion and classification in Python. I oversaw the outsourced development of the Android application.

The current version of Wise has been built with the help of Artan Sinani and is a Ruby on Rails application with a Python content parser, this is the same technology used in the previous versions recommendation engine.

All versions of Wise have been hosted on Heroku and use Circle CI for continuous integration.

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