We built Wibo, and six years later
we are still the ones running it.

A thirteen-year-old sits down in their school and answers a long set of questions about what they are good at and what they think they might want. Three years later the same person walks into a guidance centre in a different town, and the adviser they meet there can see what that thirteen-year-old said, because it is the same record and it came with them. Three years after that, they are choosing a university, and it is still there.

Making that happen is the whole architecture. The school, the centre and the university are separate organisations that share no systems or staff, and have no reason to trust each other with a child's answers. So Wibo is not a product any of them bought. It is the layer underneath all of them, which is why eight organisations run on one codebase while each has its own data, its own front end, and users who have no idea the others exist.

What moves between them is permission, and never the data on its own. An adviser can arrive already known, because the list of students they are responsible for comes out of the state's own records when they sign in. A student can say what an adviser may see, and say it piece by piece. A parent can sign a form at a centre, and the platform keeps the record of what that signature allowed. Three ways of asking, one record, and nothing is visible to anybody until one of them has happened.

More than sixty thousand people are on it: the students, the parents trying to help them, and the teachers, counsellors, advisers and psychologists who each see a different part of the same person, because keeping those parts apart is most of what the system is for.

In most countries, the help a young person gets with this is many separate efforts that were never built to connect: a programme here, a portal there, a project that ran for two years and stopped. Each one starts from nothing, and none of them can use what the last one learned. Wibo is short for vzdelávanie a kariéra bez hraníc, education and career without borders, and those are the borders it means.

In Slovakia, the choice made at fourteen or fifteen decides what can be studied afterwards, so a child who picks a school based on what a parent thinks and what a friend said has narrowed everything that follows before anyone has helped them. Guidance that begins at university, or at the first job, arrives after the decision that mattered most.

Wibo covers the whole of that journey, and the work in elementary schools is where it starts. From there it follows the same person through the high school choice, into higher education and out into their first job, with each stage able to see what the last one recorded. Somebody at the end of it is choosing something real, which is the only part of this anybody actually cares about.

That is also why it is built as a foundation rather than as a service. An organisation that wants to run career guidance in its own region does not have to start again, and the thing it builds does not disappear when its funding round ends.

The earliest part of the journey is in elementary schools, where an adviser works with students a year or two before the choice that decides what they are able to study afterwards. That is where the record starts, and it is the part of this that did not exist before.

Then there are the guidance centres. Talentcentrum is a network of them, with branches in Nitra, Trnava, Žilina, Košice and Banská Bystrica, and each branch is its own organisation on the platform with its own data and its own people. A student arrives with a form their parents have signed, works through the questionnaire there, and then sits with a psychologist and a career adviser who have the results in front of them.

Some of it is open to anybody, with no school and no centre involved. DigitalnaStrelka is one, with its own front end and its own reason to exist. Wibo itself, at wibo.ai, is the other, and it is where the work started.

Eight organisations in total, three public products, one system maintained as a whole. The next one is a change to a configuration, which is what stops eight organisations from becoming eight things to maintain.

The harness we use on client work was not designed somewhere else and then applied to Wibo. It came out of Wibo. Every project since has changed it, and what the models can do keeps moving underneath it, so carrying across that is most of what it is for.

A platform like this can be built the ordinary way, and plenty are. It takes more engineers and more people organising them, and most of what they work out stays in their heads, so when somebody leaves, part of how the system works leaves with them. The harness is where that knowledge sits instead: what was decided, what the standards are, what each part is supposed to do.

Almost all of Wibo is now written through AI flows, and the new version of it is entirely so. That is only possible because the system already holds what it is meant to do in a form something other than a person can read, and because nothing is exempt from the rest of it: the same specification before the work starts, the same checks on the way through, the same review standard afterwards, whoever or whatever produced the change. A platform where the standard covers some of the code and not the rest gets harder to operate the longer it runs.

Wibo has been in continuous production since 2020. One engineer operates it, with one more person on support and infrastructure. Everybody else counted around the platform is using it rather than running it.

Right now it is being migrated to a new version, with eight organisations and more than sixty thousand people on it while that happens, and two more being brought onto it at the same time. Zero downtime was a requirement, not an ambition. That is the hardest thing the platform has been asked to do, and it is going on while you read this.

Six years is long enough for the things that are easy to postpone to come due. Enrolment season arrives every year and the load with it. Organisations join and want their own branding and their own fields. A dependency stops being maintained. A decision made in the second year turns out to be wrong in the fifth. None of that is visible in a demonstration, and all of it is what the word running actually means.

Career guidance is almost certainly not your problem. What would arrive in your own system is everything underneath it: work that starts from something already standing instead of from an empty repository, and a system that holds what was decided and why it was decided, so that the understanding of your own software does not leave when a person does.

The closest match is anybody running many organisations from one system, whether that is a franchise network, a retailer with branches, a membership body or a company with regional offices. That is not an analogy, it is the same problem, and the hardest part of it is rarely the data model. It is identity: who somebody is, which organisation they belong to, and what they are allowed to see once they are in. We have built that against the state's own systems, which is a harder version of whatever your own branches or members already sign in with.