Innovation

During my entire time at Software by Quokka I have been working on a personal project on the side. The project, which I call Interactive History, is an interactive map that visualizes history. As a history and geography nerd, and an avid programmer, Interactive History is a convergence of three of my greatest interest.

The goal is to allow the user to learn history in a completely interactive way, with source material and references for any data point being readily available to the user. Right now, it is limited to the European theatre of the Second World War, but the long-term goal is to expand it beyond that. Work mainly consists of searching for source material in historical archives, programming, and data input. The experience I have gained working with this has made me grow both professionally as a programmer, but also personally in many ways.

Since the first contact with Software by Quokka I have been given encouragement, and shortly after being employed I got the opportunity to present the project at innovation meetups. I have also had many coaching sessions with an innovation coach within the Quokka group, and external coaching related to startups in general. This support has given me the courage to transform the project into a company that I now work on full time.

Throughout my tenure at Software by Quokka, I've devoted my spare time to nurturing a passion project, which we have named "Feedback Portal." This project is a unique feedback portal tool designed for software developers. As someone deeply immersed in the world of programming and team management, Feedback Portal is the embodiment of my fascination with software development, team collaboration, and innovative technology.

The core objective of Feedback Portal is to streamline the feedback collection process for software developers. It's equipped with several distinctive features that not only allow for effective feedback gathering but also facilitate a more engaging and constructive dialogue between developers and their managers. Currently, the platform focuses on software development teams, but I envision expanding it into a comprehensive ecosystem that supports various aspects of managerial and development routines.

From my first day at Software by Quokka, I received immense support for this project. The nurturing environment at Software by Quokka has not only bolstered my confidence but also empowered me to consider evolving Feedback Portal into a standalone project.

I stumbled upon the idea to build Themes for the Shopify platform while building custom storefronts from scratch, for various friends and family. I found a lot of code was reused and wanted to avoid managing payments, store infrastructure, and authentication solutions. Instead, I wanted to focus specifically on the visual aspect, along with the user experience.

Selling themes through the Shopify Theme Store allows me to focus on the user experience, the business and marketing, and leaving the payments, authentication, and inventory management to Shopify.

This setup allows me to put in the work upfront by building a component library that provides a set of base components for each new theme I create which reduces the amount of work required in developing a theme. The biggest challenge in setting up this business is the customer support and ongoing maintenance of the themes to ensure they remain up-to-date with the improvements from the major modern browsers. Designing and building the themes is the easy part!

While developing my idea, Software by Quokka has been friendly, supportive, and instrumental in bringing people together and developing my network. I am glad to be part of this company.