A microservices story: Creating “Wingspans”, a robust educational platform that connects students with careers

Wingspans is an educational platform that helps middle- and high-school students navigate the path to a meaningful career. Over 700 personal stories help convey the variety of careers available and how students can tailor their education with their working future in mind. Students take personality and skill assessments and then explore suggested careers, majors, schools, and real-world business profiles to create their own career path plan. Plans can be shared with teachers, guidance counselors, peers, and their parents for discussion and refinement.

The platform architecture had to support frictionless sign up, ultra-fast page speed, a rewards-system to encourage deep exploration, and notifications to drive engagement at the right times. On the business side, the monetization strategy needed a platform that could quickly scale to support entire schools comingonline at once. We turned to a mix of micro-services to meet these needs including Gatsby, Firebase and Firestore, AWS, Algolia, Cosmic JS, Google, and more.

We will explore our experience with these micro-services — the good, the bad, and the ugly — including how we selected them, what each needs to do, and what they promised vs. what they delivered. We’ll even try to answer the burning question on everyone’s minds — knowing what we know now, what would we have done differently?