Threadable

Threadable

A social e-reader allowing users to annotate, read, and discuss books with large communities.

    Role

  • Head of Engineering, Technical Co-Founder

    Duration

  • 3 years

A team of Harvard historians had an idea for improving the quality of online discourse through digital tools. Threadable is a new way to engage with books: imagine an e-book where you read alongside expert guides, within small reading circles.

How Do e-Books Work?

This project started off as a design contract to build a prototype. The founders would take the figma prototype to conduct some user testing and see if there was market fit. When I heard about the project, however, I decided to build a quick React Native app to see if it was even possible.

The first problem I had to solve: how do you actually read e-books? The standard for digital books are .epub files -- these can be opened by iBooks, Kindle, Nook, and more. Under the hood epub files are just HTML and CSS. This is what allows them to resize so easily and fit so many devices.

But how can you read a file built upon HTML in a native app with no browser? The first approach was to load a web view, package epub.js (an open source library) and preload the packaged library at build time. This sort of worked. The book loaded and you could highlight it, but we needed a way to send data back and forth between the web view and the native app. We also needed to overwrite the context menu that appears when highlighting text.

Something that wasn't possible at the time, although I eventually wrote an open source PR in Objective-C for react-native-webview to make it possible

So, I ventured into a new programming language to build it myself. I'd never used Swift before and although the basics seemed straightforward, there was literally no examples out there of how to use Swift with React Native.

There was some trial and error, but eventually I was able to build our custom web view class that could be loaded in React Native, pre-packaged with epub.js, and a custom context menu that communicated with our native systems.

To share my learnings, I created a YouTube video breaking down how to build React Native modules in Swift.

Tech Stack

The front-end is React Native for iOS and React for the web app. The backend is built with Ruby on Rails but we integrate with firebase for a lot of services (such as OAuth and push notifications). Files are stored in Google Cloud Buckets and we leverage BigQuery for analytics. Custom modules are built in both Objective-C and Swift.

Testimonial

I don't know if I can even put into words the impact Scott had on me and my career. He taught me so much about problem solving, collaboration, mentorship, and how being a kind, patient, supportive engineer is just as (if not more) important than being a smart one!

  • Caitlin Wang, Senior Fullstack engineer