AAK Tele-Science MVP & Feature Development - Legacy Elgg Website

In this project, I served as the backend team lead for the development and maintenance of AAK Tele-Science’s legacy platform, which was built using the PHP Elgg framework & JavaScript. The project faced substantial technical and operational challenges, largely due to the choice of the Elgg tech stack by a previous administration. Despite its inherent limitations, I successfully led the team to build and deliver an initial MVP that was crucial to the company’s operations. This project laid the foundation for many of the high-impact projects that followed.

AAK Tele-Science is a startup based in California, USA that strives to bridge the gap between academia in industry through an ambitious online platform that acts both as social media and a collaborative space. This online platform is intended to provide numerous services to researchers, investors & institutions such as:

Research project collaboration & funding opportunities.

Lucrative investment opportunities in creative scientific projects.

Expanding professional network by finding researchers, investors & institutions recommended to you through AI services.

Profile building services, including research & investment portfolio imports & AI-driven data analytics.

Other collaborative, social media & fintech services such as complex events capabilities intended for scientific conferences & workshops, extensive blogs functionalities, news feed, chat & blockchain integration for scientific digital assets, NFTs & smart contracts.

Elgg was chosen by the administration at the time as the foundation for AAK Tele-Science’s first website due to its built-in social media components. Elgg is a customizable monolithic web framework written in PHP and MySQL, designed for building social apps. It comes with numerous built-in features like user registration, authentication, groups, blogs, notifications, and more. However, Elgg presented significant drawbacks that severely impacted our development workflow and product scalability:

Poor documentation and a small community, leading to difficulty finding solutions or hiring experts.

Complex file structure with poor separation between frontend and backend, making development inefficient.

Challenging installation procedures that required outdated methods like FTP, complicating development and testing environments.

Scalability concerns due to its monolithic architecture, which was not suitable for long-term growth.

Inflexible design which led to difficulties incorporating custom UI/UX mockups.

Originally tasked with leading the Data Engineering APIs team in Python, I stepped in when the Elgg team was falling behind schedule and the project was at risk of failure. I took over as the backend team lead for the Elgg development, supervising both the backend and frontend teams. My role involved not only building core features but also guiding other developers—many of whom struggled with Elgg’s steep learning curve. I contributed approximately 50% of the direct development effort while also coordinating efforts across teams, ensuring that the project could be completed despite the numerous challenges posed by Elgg. In recognition for my contributions to this platform, I was elected in the Board of Directors for the following 2 years, where I led the AAK Tele-Science team to transition away from Elgg towards more robust and modern tech stacks, architectures & best practices, as shown in my other projects in my portfolio.

I also created a 6-minute promotional video for the platform attached above, which markets the platform’s features and business goals. This video highlights the functionalities of the MVP and explains the mission of AAK Tele-Science, serving as a key asset for marketing and investor relations.

Despite the many technical issues, the project was delivered as an early MVP for AAK Tele-Science, allowing users to perform several important actions:

User Accounts: Users could sign up as researchers or investors, and institutions could be created or joined.

Scientific Portfolio Import: Researchers could import publications from Google Scholar, research grants from NSF, NIH, EU Horizon, and patents from the USA.

Data Analytics: Integrated data analytics allowed users to calculate metrics such as innovation and market relevance indices.

Investment Portfolio Integration: Investors could import their investment data from the USA SEC Edgar database, with real-time analytics for decision-making.

Project Collaboration: Users could create research projects and highlight needs such as funding or collaboration opportunities, and receive AI-generated recommendations for matching profiles.

Invitations and Notifications: Users could send project invitations and receive web/email notifications for various actions, such as receiving project proposals or contracts.

Proposals and Contracts: Users could submit proposals for projects, exchange contracts with terms, and sign contracts within the platform.

Institution Info: The platform compiled institutional data from sources like EU Horizon, SEC, and Crunchbase.

Complex events: allows for hosting events on the level of scientific conferences & workshops, and allows hosts to customize their events registration form to include custom question & question types for attendees, determine event days, schedule & activities, location & rooms, capacity per activity, fees... etc.

Complex Collaborative Blogs: Users could write multi-page nested blogs, which allows researchers to share their findings & write complete tutorials & documentations for their work.

Chat: Users could chat in real-time.

Admin Panel: A full admin panel was developed for platform management.

While Elgg’s built-in components contributed to some of these features, the majority of the custom features — like API integration, chart analytics, and collaboration tools — were either led, supervised or outright implemented from scratch by the team.

The project was rife with technical and operational challenges due to the limitations of the Elgg framework:

Poor documentation and minimal community support meant developers had to spend excessive time troubleshooting issues. As team lead, I often had to step in to help resolve blockers.

Inflexible architecture led to slow progress when frontend developers had to modify backend code, which was embedded deeply into Elgg plugins. This resulted in significant inefficiencies.

Inflexible design led to difficulties integrating custom UI/UX mockups tailored for the business, which in turn led to an outdated-looking website design.

Challenging deployment environment due to Elgg’s outdated installation procedures. Developers had to resort to unhealthy practices like deploying code through FTP servers for testing, further complicating the process.

Despite these challenges, the MVP was completed and operational, though the experience highlighted the need for a more robust, scalable platform. These pain points eventually led to the decision to migrate away from Elgg and adopt a microservices-based architecture using modern technologies, which I later spearheaded as a Member of the Board of Directors.

The completion of this MVP allowed AAK Tele-Science to move forward with critical business operations. It provided valuable lessons about platform architecture, scalability, and team management, setting the stage for the migration to a more stable and scalable tech stack. This experience directly contributed to the success of later projects where I led the migration to a microservices-based system, incorporating Python, Django, ReactJS, and containerized deployment through Docker and Kubernetes.