Odyssey

• tm.odyssey.today

• 2019 - present

• My role: SW architecture, ~95% of implementation, deployment, maintenance, operations. Co-created the concept, UI design, UX.

Odyssey is a mentoring platform, currently piloting in Toastmasters International organisation. Odyssey offers its registered users the possibility to find a mentor or a mentee in the system's user database and establishes a mentoring relationship. The mentor-mentee matching is an automated process allowing the user to find the optimal pair based on common language, common skills and several personal preferences and characteristics. More details abut Odyssey can be found on the platform's webpage.

Odyssey is currently managed by a team of 6 volunteers, taking care of planning, growth, promotion, user experience, tech.

From a technical point of view the Odyssey platform is designed as follows: Input data is fed from a registration page and a feedback page (HTML+CSS+JS/Vue.js). The data is stored in a database (MySQL). The matching algorithm (C) assigns a score to each possible mentor-mentee pair (based on skills and personality) while flagging "impossible" pairs (because e.g. no language in common or the pair has met before). After this, the optimisation algorithm maximises the overall score, while obeying all constraints. Communication with platform members is done by automated, personalized emails.

At the present moment the platform is highly automatized, operations taking about 15-30 minutes/month.