In my recent catchup blog post I mentioned in passing a few projects including Jutda and WhisperGifts. Now, I'd like to formally introduce the former of these (with the latter coming very soon now)
When I'm not 'at work', I spend a significant amount of time working on other projects both independently and together with other talented developers. These days, all of these projects are powered by Django.
Jutda is the glue that will pull these projects together under a single name.
The name comes from the nearly-extinct Wagiman language, spoken by a small number of indigenous Australians. It means "to point" or "to show", which I've taken on as the ethos of my new company: We’re aiming to show the way to others, to make life easier through the use of elegant online solutions.
The ultimate aim is to create simple solutions for everyday problems. No bells, no whistles, just beautiful outcomes for ugly problems.
More information about Jutda can be seen on the About Jutda page, and in the initial blog post I published on the Jutda website.
The first project that's been finished and published is WhisperGifts, about which I'll write more in a future blog post. I'm very excited about the possibilities of this, and the impact it may have on couples in the process of organising their wedding festivities.
I've also got a few other projects in the pipeline, with no fixed feature-set or timeline. Projects that are well on their way to adulthood include:
- A personal fixed asset register: Do you know the serial number of your television? The warranty details for your refrigerator? The phone number of the guy who borrowed your Playstation for his son to use over Christmas? What would you do if your house burnt down tomorrow, taking all of your warranty paperwork with it? I'm helping you sort out this mess.
- A personal information manager: There's been many takes on these, but none of them suit my needs quite well enough. Why can't I keep track of pages of information along with photos, embedded maps, lists, enhanced details of my contacts, and more - all in one place?
- An open-source ticket tracker / helpdesk system. We're currently using a Django-powered helpdesk system internally to manage WhisperGifts support queries, and we're in the process of cleaning it up and abstracting it out from our other systems so that we can publish it for everybody to see and use. It's written in Django, it has full e-mail integration, it has both public and private web interfaces, and it provides open access to your data. It rocks.
So that's Jutda. Although I'm not planning for it to take over and become a full-time job, I hope to get some useful tools out in the wild for everyday consumers, whilst contributing further code back to the Django community wherever possible. Wish me luck!