The Academy puts recent grads and laid-off engineers onto real Irish software projects. You ship production code under a mentor and graduate with a public reference — so the gap on your CV reads "still building," not "doing nothing."
Who it's for
If you're not shipping anything, recruiters can't tell the difference between "between roles" and "out of the game." The Academy keeps you visibly building.
You've finished the degree or the bootcamp. Every junior listing wants "2 years commercial experience." Your GitHub is all coursework. You need one real thing, on a real product, that a real person will vouch for.
You can build. But the search is slow, the market is flooded, and a six-month gap with nothing to show reads badly. The fix isn't more applications — it's staying demonstrably sharp while you look.
The hard truth
Recruiters skim for momentum. A candidate who is currently building beats a candidate who is currently waiting — every time. We wrote the whole argument down.
The work is real
Each cohort takes one well-bounded project on a live Irish product. You pick a role that fits your aptitude, ship for four weeks, and graduate with a reference.
localnews.ie is a local-intelligence engine: it listens to local radio around the clock and reads every council agenda, court list, planning file and death notice in the country. Carlow is dark. Your cohort lights it up — building the scrapers, entity maps, town pages and design that put a whole county on the civic map.
Ship 10 editorial explainer pages on myid.ie that actually rank. Writers, researchers, an SEO analyst and a vibe coder pair up to take topics from brief to published and indexed.
See all cohorts →Enrich the Irish pub directory with verified data: opening hours, food, music, sport, accessibility. Each builder owns a county and ships it in a four-week sprint.
See all cohorts →This is not a blog. It's infrastructure.
Most people hear "local news site" and picture a WordPress blog. It isn't. localnews.ie is a civic-intelligence platform that ingests the raw record of Irish public life and turns it into a searchable, structured, machine-readable index — the kind of thing newsrooms and councils wish they had.
You won't shadow this from the sidelines. You'll extend it — write a scraper that survives a real website, design the town pages, map the entities for a county that has none. Your name goes on the commit and the reference.
How it works
A public reference and a piece of live work you can point at — that's the entire deliverable.
Pick a cohort and fill out a short form. We match you to a role that fits your aptitude.
The cohort starts when enough builders are confirmed. You meet your mentor and team on a kickoff call.
Four weeks of real work on a real Irish site. Weekly mentor check-in. Issue-tracked, paced, supported.
Your mentor signs off. You get a public reference at builtinireland.ie/references/<you> linked to the live work.
The whole point
Most courses graduate you with a certificate. A certificate proves you finished. It doesn't prove you shipped.
The Academy graduates you with a reference letter hosted at a verifiable URL, co-signed by Built In Ireland and Raven Design. It names the cohort, names the project, names the specific work you did, and links to it live. Any employer, recruiter or client can open the URL and see the proof for themselves.
Shipped the County Carlow scraper and town pages for localnews.ie: built the source ingester, mapped 40+ local entities, and published 12 town pages now live in production.
Worked to weekly deadlines under mentorship across a four-week cohort. We'd hire them.
You'll work on a real site
Every Academy project runs on a live Irish product with real users and real traffic. More join the rotation as cohorts run.
Honest expectations
It's free, but it isn't a casual course. It's a short, real sprint with real deadlines and real users.
Mentored by working operators
Kali runs a portfolio of live Irish software products — the same sites you'd be shipping on. You're not handed a syllabus and left alone; you work alongside an operator who ships production code on these platforms every week, and who signs your reference at the end. Meet the mentors →
Cohort 1 is forming now — County Carlow on localnews.ie. Free, mentored, and it ends with a reference you can hand to anyone.