Client: Escouts

Project: Escouts Route Hiker - A free to use website for planning and creating hikes for walkers in the UK.

Nearly five years ago I was doing the Duke of Edinburgh scheme through my school. When it came to creating the route cards for the hikes, our team got very frustrated and annoyed - if you make a mistake you have to go back and work out all the timings again. This sometimes resulted in spending hours on filling in the paperwork.

To solve this problem I created an Excel Spreadsheet. This basically worked out the timings automatically, and proved to be a huge success for our Duke of Edinburgh team. I had been part of the Escouts community for nearly a year at this point, and realised that others could benefit from using my spreadsheet. For this reason, I decided to make a small website with the same principle as the spreadsheet. With a huge amount of participation and ideas from the Escouts Community over the course of a year, the website went live, and has consistently grown in it’s usage over the last year. With 1039 users to date and no marketing done by myself, this project appears to have huge potential. For this reason I decided to turn the project into a company called ‘RouteHiker’, which will hopefully go live later this year.

Why is it that when a voluntary or free project comes along, you just can’t say no! Over the last month i’ve been building a series of new web applications for Escouts, an online community that provides free hosting for Scout Groups in the UK.

I’ve taken on the role of the lead developer / organiser, and have a team of about 8 people working on the projects with me. The team are fantastic - they are a bit inexperienced, but they’re so enthusiastic to learn and improve their skills we’ve got on really well, and i’ve seen a huge improvement in the skills of some of the team over the last few months.

One of the main specifications which we drew up for the applications is to have them all integrated together, so they share user sessions and information. To do this, I suggested we use Jamdora, my web application platform. After typing up a few pages of documentation and letting the team loose at it, the feedback coming in, and they all loved it! I knew I was onto something when I came up with the idea for Jamdora!

The applications we’re currently building are a hosting/order system, a search engine, an awards system, a helpdesk and a server status site. So far we’re about half way through the build, but now the team have got the hang of coding in Jamdora development speed should increase rapidly. I’ll keep posted on this over the coming weeks, the end product should be very interesting!