By BLAKE METCALF-HOLT
TRARALGON youngster Jack Curran is similar to many kids in that he spends time in front of a computer.
Unlike most however, this nine-year-old has just developed and released his own web app.
‘Feast Finder’ hit the waves recently, helping locals find worthy meal deals in the Traralgon area at a good rate.
After being turned onto coding last year, Jack fiddled around with a few projects before his father Roger passed along the idea from a similar app he had worked on back in his home country, South Africa.
“I did mine 10 years ago, just as a side hobby, and Jack was looking for some ideas and I was like ‘you can give this a go.’ He built a much more full featured version of what I had many years ago,” Roger said.
Jack had already become invested in this world, learning the basics over the course of many months to recognise the programming languages necessary to make something of his own.
He described the experience of coding as “quite fun”, being able to work through and “mess up everything.”
By the time he nailed down his rough estimations of how Feast Finder would work, it took Jack just three weeks to put it out into the world.
An hour per day paid dividends, as Jack committed to seeing his project complete and put out into the public.
“I usually stop halfway (with projects) and I stop getting interested, but with Feast Finder I couldn’t give people a half-interesting product that doesn’t really work … so I had to finish it,” Jack told the Express.
Both father and son called up around 15 local businesses as a starting point, and since the app has gone live, even more have reached out to utilise the service.
To give his Feast Finder a bit of a boost, on the first day of its release, Roger posted a video on Traralgon’s community Facebook page, and subsequently garnered more than 23,000 views.
Jack was surprised when he saw just two people online, but was ecstatic and grateful of the response that immediately followed.
The app went gangbusters and attracted more than 700 users in its first 24 hours.
“People started coming in, which gave me real excitement,” Jack said.
Jack has tinkered with a few details and features since Feast Finder’s launch, and hopes that new ideas can form over time for not just this app, but others as well.
However, as school returned, Jack realises that this fun potential side hustle isn’t his sole responsibility.
“It’s more of a learning process, not much of a business,” he said.
A deeply curious kid, Jack has undertaken other projects in recent months, including building a facial recognition system and green screen system through the use of his Raspberry Pi camera.
While still in the early stages of his life and in coding, Jack hopes this can lead down a career path, whether it’s for a company or through his own service.
He also enjoys space and science books, and has made his own miniature rockets at home, so perhaps a role at NASA or the Australian Space Agency is on the horizon.
Jack hopes to inspire other kids around his age to take up coding, seeing their own ideas come to fruition and finding the enjoyment in it.
