By PSS | Posted: Friday June 8, 2018
Baby&You began as a simple idea to bring curated content for new parents right to their fingertips. It was brought to life by a student in his final year of SIT and despite a few glitches has seen great success. That is, until the app expired earlier this year.
Family Works reached out to Digital Stock for some advice. Hosting the app and fixing some of the issues would cost a considerable amount of money. So Digital Stock decided to give two young men from James Hargest the opportunity to further their skills as part of their intern programme. Alex Thomson and Shea Smith are currently gaining meaningful work experience by redesigning the app to be more responsive and easier for admin to curate.
Dawn Lloyd, Manager of Family Works is eagerly awaiting the new release, “it means as an agency we can be immediately responsive.” Until now it has been her job to curate all the content on the app and check any broken links manually.
Alex, Shea and the Digital Stock team have pulled the app to bits and redesigned it with a new computer language. The app will look identical from the audience point of view, but “we’ve built a powerful backend,” says Avinash (Nash) Varghese, cofounder of Digital Stock. “That’s what we do.”
It took Alex and Shea with help from the Digital Stock team six weeks to redo the backend. “To do what they did at 16 is impressive,” Nash says.
The build became an assessment of sorts, for Alex and Shea to gain employment with the Digital Stock team. Usually the interns work on their own projects, but working with clients means meetings and deadlines too.
“It’s a lot more rewarding working with a client,” Shea says. “You can see how they like the app.” He explains how you can’t cut corners like you can with personal projects, “you have to do things right.” “It was great because it helped me sharpen myskills as a developer and help someone out,” says Alex.
Digital Stock are committed to working alongside not-for profits, and their expertise with the app has been invaluable.
“We’re extremely grateful,” Dawn says. “Digital Stock have gone beyond our expectations of what anyone would do for the Baby&You app, and Family Works.”
The Baby&You app is available throughout New Zealand on iOS and Android devices, and while there is some localised content for Southlanders like emergency doctor contacts, most of the content comes from National links. Dawn says “any new parent in New Zealand would find the benefit in it.”