About
Quinn was born out of an effort to use Qntfy's Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology (powering OurDataHelps) in a team-focused setting rather than an individual one. The goal was to create a tool that could be used to foster healthier teams — ones where teams are more cohesive, transparent, and focused on building great culture.
Since we had all of the NLP machine learning algorithms from OurDataHelps, the bulk of the effort was architecting a system which could
- Communicate with Slack's real time messaging, events, and rest APIs for team registration, bot integration, message processing, and reporting
- Scale well with many teams using the system at the same time
- Ensure the privacy of all users and teams using Quinn
- Generate insightful reports which both quantify and qualify team well-being
To ensure we could isolate bottlenecks and scale appropriately, the system adoped a microservice-based design roughly similar to systems that Qntfy had developed for DARPA. Components which interacted with Slack were split up into their own services — registering a team, collecting and processing messages, and generating reports. Most of the data pathways between services were handled by Kafka and temporarily persisted data aged off rapidly once scored by the analytics.
The vast majority of the prototype was completed by a collegue and I in around 2-3 months amid our other projects, responsibilities, and commitments. The Founder and CEO of the company, Glen Coppersmith, designed and built the reporting capability which was expanded upon by another collegue as we iterated futher on Quinn.
After building the initial prototype, it was our belief that Quinn was a new, novel technology for measuring team health which led to us patenting the technology. I was honored to be named as an inventor on the patent and hope that Quinn is able to help build and maintain great teams in the future.
This project gave me a great understanding of Slack's API and how to build products for it. Check out the GTM Ctrl project that I built for my motorsports club using the knowledge I gained building Quinn.