WePower Engineering Blog Series #1: Structure, focus and core principles behind WePower’s technical development

Hello,

I am Kaspar, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at WePower. My role, as the name implies, is focused on turning the ambitious technological vision of WePower into a reality.

At WePower we strongly believe that game changing business should go hand in hand with the game changing product. This is why in over the course of several blog post I want to introduce you to the engineering team that is building the WePower platform and provide a first hand insight into what we are working on as we build the WePower platform.

Three teams — two continents

WePower engineering team is currently organized into 3 teams, plus technical advisory network:

Central solution architecture / systems engineering team led by Heikki Kolk, a complex system engineer with strong expertise in smart power grids and energy IoT solutions;

Estonian software development team led by Janari Kaskmaa, an experienced software engineer has lead engineering for a Skype Payments team;

Australian software development team led by Imre Miilberg, a full-stack developer who in his past roles rewrote the architecture behind Skype services’ accounting for billions of users and developed the user interface for Pipedrive.

The two software development teams are focused on evolving our MVP platform to fit the use cases tested over the course of our pilot with Elering and soon the uses cases defined with the energy partners in Australia where we are a part of the Startupbootcamp Energy program. The solution architecture and system engineering team is focused on translating the core functionalities and system integrations outlined in WePower white paper into an implementable architecture. We believe that this structure allow us to be adaptable to the needs of our clients yet still focused on building out a scalable and standardized core feature and integration set.

A big focus for me personally right now is recruiting to expand our both software development teams. Our pilot with Elering is gaining traction, we are starting our operations in Australia and have new partners interested in running test with us. We face a lot of exciting opportunities and interesting challenges every day. If you happen to be a senior developers who’s passionate about making the world greener, let us know!

Focused on energy auctions and system architecture

Our team work is planned around the general phases outlined in our white paper and soon in a new video that we will release. Currently our main day-to-day focus is on the WePower-Elering pilot project. We are working on developing and refining the core features necessary for launching auctions in November of this year:

Scalable backend setup to make sure that the platform can be applied to energy systems and markets of different size and complexity;

New and improved UI with features tailored to the specific needs of energy traders and utility size green energy producers;

Energy token smart contract structure tested and validated with our partner Elering.

Our systems engineering team is also working on the implementable architecture for connecting energy tokens into the real energy system. This is perhaps the most complex engineering challenge that we have but given our team expertise in this field I am already very excited about the developments that we will start seeing once the architecture is finalized and the integrations get built in.

Moving fast through partnerships

Building WePower is not a trivial task. Projects of our kind take time, very rare expertise and effort to build. We are fortunate to have the need expertise, ambition and drive that results in strong effort but when it comes to the time we are extremely keen on looking for ways to move fast, be agile and stay as efficient as we can possibly be. This is why in addition to the core system design and architecture that’s done in-house, we use a two-tier outsourcing model.

Tier one is the core development ecosystem. This is where our partners bring and integrate know-how together in a co-development model. Catapult Labs is our first key strategic partner here. They bring us a critical know-how on the certain aspects of the IoT and Smart Metering systems that WePower platform will integrate with.

Generally, we see companies and people falling under the core development ecosystem partnership structure as very integral to WePower. Here we only work with trusted partners that we have prior work experience and know well. We have shared incentive and motivation systems to ensure that our teams are aligned. As we move forward, we even see companies from this tier one partnership structure integrating with the WePower team.

Tier two is where the more typical contractor-based partnerships fall. We use these contractors for some parts of the platform development and more heavily in solving local integration problems in specific markets. We see these partnerships more from a more of a get-things-done as opposed to a strategic perspective. However, they still play an important role helping us develop, localized and scale faster.

Through my career I have seen companies and projects falling into all-ourselves trap, which very frequently resulted in frictions coming out of the needed skill gaps or inflated engineering teams where team coordination and processes would eat up most of the productive time in turn slowing down product development drastically. Partnerships already gave a strong traction to WePower and I believe that this core plus partnership driven approach will accelerate us further and give a strong competitive edge as we move forward faster.

More to come

I hope you enjoyed this overview of our technological development approach and structure. I am confident, that engineering team we have assembled will be an essential foundation for the continued development of WePower. I will be happy to update you regarding our progress. In the upcoming blogs I’ll introduce you to my role, the roles of our team leads, WePower platform development and our pilot projects status, which will shed a bit more light into our backgrounds and why we are so passionate about building WePower.

Stay tuned!