Peerwith is a platform for expert-led researcher services. It helps academics seeking to raise the quality of their scientific work to connect with peers who are experts in researcher services. Peerwith partners with the best publishers, societies, and institutes to help bring author services to a wide academic audience. This way researchers can improve the quality of their academic work while building lasting relationships with peers from their academic discipline.

The challenge

The platform lacked the capacity to deal with a growing number of partners and users. When the customer contacted us for the first time, the startup was in need of software development services for marketplace expansion and the development of new features. Peerwith also needed the flexibility to scale the team up and down according to the development capacity required at any particular phase of the project.

The solution

ELITEX and Peerwith started cooperating in 2017. Before that, our client tried the services of multiple freelancers and other software development companies. ELITEX offered a more consistent approach to the work and the client decided to stay with us. Over the years, ELITEX was flexible to the needs of the customer. The development team consisted of developers of various levels and its size was changing based on the workload. ELITEX has also proven a strong ability to prepare and mentor the newcomers to the project. While ELITEX was managing and motivating the team members from its side, from the customer’s perspective remote engineers were managed by Peerwith’s CTO, who communicated with the team on a regular basis, setting priorities and managing the tasks.

We used the following technologies:

Backend

• Node.js

• Express

• MongoDB

• Elasticsearch

Frontend

• AngularJS

• Angular 2+

• Polymer

• HTML/CSS

Webapps were deployed with AWS (Amazon Web Services), which allowed easy and quick infrastructure scalability at a reasonable cost.

The result

Our software engineers worked on various parts of the project:

• Submission portal

• Invoicing

• Rankings

• Experts section

• Administrative sections

• Partners' webpages

During our cooperation, Peerwith also launched a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution - Cockpit, a management console for administrative users at the partner level.

We helped Cockpit in the development of different features:

• monitoring usage of the platform at a partner level;

• access and controlling features related to a partner / institutional account;

• administrative features (budgeting or billing);

• reporting.

While the core work for Peerwith has been already done, ELITEX continues to support the startup, developing new parts of the system and tuning existing ones.