We’re introducing a new column in which we’ll be interviewing experts in the tech industry, and it’s opened by Arthur Delerue, CEO & Founder at KWatch.io. Arthur Delerue is a full-stack developer with a marketing background. He launched KWatch.io to help marketers and founders better leverage the power of social media.
Hello Arthur! We are happy to offer you an opportunity like an interview to tell a wider audience more about you and your experience. How did you start your career, and why did you choose this particular field?
I initially studied business and after a couple of years doing marketing consulting and product management I finally pivoted to a programming career. I spent several years as a full-stack developer, specialized in Python, Go, and Linux systems. Today, I find it very rewarding to have good knowledge on both the business side and technical side of things, and I finally decided that it was the right time to launch my own business.
Could you tell us a little bit more about your platform — Kwatch.io? How did you get the idea to create it? What is the algorithm of the platform?
The idea came when I was doing a bit of marketing freelancing, a couple of years ago, and I realized that social media were becoming more and more central in business development. I realized it was crucial to engage quickly on social media, but companies did not have the tools to efficiently and reliably listen to social media in real time. So I decided to create this social media monitoring tool called KWatch.io, that monitors Reddit, Hacker News, LinkedIn, X, and Quora, in real-time, sends you email and Slack notifications, and automatically performs sentiment analysis.
What technologies were involved in the development of the platform? What difficulties did you face? How did you overcome them?
The platform is coded in Go because this language is both very fast and good at handling many simultaneous requests on social media. Go allows us to absorb very large volumes of data, analyze the data efficiently, and alert our customers in real time. Additionally, our architecture is based on Docker microservices. We had to face many challenges in order to release a stable version of KWatch.io. Here are 2 examples:
- Handle large volumes of requests without missing data.
- Monitor social media at scale for all our customers without getting blocked by the platforms.