The Project:
VYGR helps you share and discover places loved by people you know and trust. It is designed to let users easily add places, find new spots,
curate and share lists of venues, spots and places they really enjoy or are enjoyed by others. VYGR is designed to overcome the problem of
sifting through thousands of reviews on Google/Yelp/Zomato or dozens of TOP-10 lists by connecting you with new and familiar places via people
you actually know, trust and like!
https://www.vygrapp.com/
The Story:
In mid-2020, I started teaching myself to code. I had no idea what I was doing, all I knew is that if I had to type "Hello World" one more time
I was going to explode. So I decided to try and build a thing that had been percolating in my head for a few years. It took me until about
January 2022 to finally get a version of it polished enough to deploy it. It is built entirely using the "holy-trinity" aka HTML/CSS and JavaScript
with Django backend sitting on a PostgreSQL Database coupled with GDAL Geospatial Data Library. Suffice to say, back when I started building this thing I had
no clue what any of these technologies were. Behold the power of StackOverflow, Reddit, Google, a sprinkle of Udemy and Codementor.com and pure headbanging brute force.
The Project:
Decoder makes understanding word structure simple.
Understanding the parts that make up a word and knowing what these parts do to a word's meaning is crucial building block for text comprehension.
Decoder provides a dynamic visualisation of a word's phontactic, phonetic and morphololgic structure and explains what these things are and what they do.
Decoder is still in development - input/feedback/thoughts very much welcome.
Decoder on GitHub
The Story:
For the past decade I have worked in secondary schools working with highly marginalised and at risk
students. During this journey I was right at the coal face of the issues facing young people with tenuous connection to school and other institutions. A major
component of this tenuous connection was weak literacy. At the same time I was acutely aware of my own shortcomings in teaching teenagers the mechanics of reading.
I am interested to see how a tight feedback loop between educators, academia and software/web-developers can leverage
technology to play a meaningful part in the critically important mission of helping all young people to read with confidence. Decoder is my first step in that direction
and draws on cutting-edge evidence based reading science, my lived experience as an educator and my emerging skills as a developer. Decoder is built using React (I am still very new to this) and is
still in fairly early development, check out the github link to poke around.
The Project:
Sursum provides digital, data and creative services to small non-profit and for-profit organisations.
The Story:
I set up Sursum to channel my love of creative content, digital design, web-development and data driven story-telling into
providing services to organisations that have some identified capacity gaps. I have worked on data analysis for educational providers,
provided data-driven messaging consulting to tech-companies and undertaken scriptwriting services for educational content companies.
The Project:
Denton Global Politics offers short videos with an ironic twist aligned to Year 12 Global Politics Curriculum. The videos are deeply researched,
but presented with an eye to humour and engagement.
Denton Global Politics on YouTube
The Story:
My academic background is International Relations, I love the subject matter (very depressed by it these days - but can't look away). I was fortunate
enough to apply this knowledge teaching Year 12 Global Politics, I loved teaching it and was proud of my students who achieved very strong results and
left school inspired and interested in working globally. At the same time, I saw a gap in the market of curriculum aligned videos that are fairly dry
and powerpoint-driven. I wanted to combine my stupid, pop-culture laden sense of humour with serious subject matter. While I would love to create more of
this content, sadly I have had to prioritise other pursuits. Nevertheless, I have been recognised in a cafe and a mobile phone store by Year 12 students
who enjoy my videos, so I feel my next step may be a Marvel film...
The Project:
Stoop Party is a short-lived, off-beat sketch comedy channel on YouTube created by yours truly and my good friend. While short-lived some (me) would say it
has influenced the direction of comedy more so than anything since, um, the Bible(?)
Stoop Party on YouTube
The Story:
My friend and I had always spoken about trying our hand at comedy, and this was back in 2014/15, back then dudes like us were making sketch comedy, these days
its all podcast, podcast, podcast. Not for me, nope, we loved Tim and Eric, Aunty Donna, Good Neighbour Stuff, early CollegeHumour, 30 Rock, good SNL, and all of
these things combined with a love of writing, making people laugh, doing projects and learning Adobe Premiere combined into Stoop Party. If we'd stuck with it and
pivoted to Tik-Tok we'd be probably rolling in tens of dollars by now.
