jessejak.com

Jesse Jak

Jesse Jak is a teacher and founder building EdTech with Claude Code. Projects, writing, and notes from building in public.

Hi, I'm Jesse Jak. I'm a teacher from Melbourne and the founder of ReVerbal Intelligence. I now live in New Zealand and build tools for teachers with Claude Code. This site is where I share what I build, what works, what does not, and what I change. I am open to developer relations roles.

Building EdTech that gives teachers time back

What sparked this idea?

Being able-bodied, with good hearing, good eyesight, and the rest, I have never dealt with the struggle of disability and the workarounds to enable living in our society. I am experiencing this in one form when I visit my nanna and try to speak with her. She is 96 years old and hates her hearing aid. This has resulted in disconnection even when we are with her.

A quick fix was using a notepad and pen to write down words she couldn't lipread. Besides being slow it often resulted in broken conversations as her short-term memory is also affected.

After multiple visits using this low-tech solution, I tried my Samsung Notes app and voice-to-text function to live transcribe our conversation. Voila! An immediate improvement. My nanna kept up with the large text displaying our (my sister, my nanna, and my conversation), allowing us to have an interaction vastly different from those times using handwritten notes. However, there still existed limitations. And that is where this project begins.


Day 1

Many heads make light bulbs

*EasySpeak*, a placeholder name, has remained in the ideation stage for however long now. I spoke to my friend, Liam, who gave sound advice about where to start and where a project like this could take me. As long as the execution is there.

I still needed direction about an efficient tech stack for this kind of program.

Just my luck, I run into an old friend at my cousin's wedding. Jeno works as a programmer at Canva and he attends a monthly build club in Melbourne. I joined the following month, gained a mountain of help and found a welcoming community.

That is where I find myself so far. Building with Next.js and using OpenAI's Whisper API.


Day 40

Going all in

"Give *EasySpeak* a try." was a placeholder for this entry that I wrote on Day 40.

So much has happened since then. Firstly, I decided on the name *ReVerbal* not *EasySpeak*, as the latter was used extensively in different arenas. It makes sense since the conception is elementary wordplay. The name was always a placeholder, and deciding on *ReVerbal* did not take long once I began to take this thing seriously.

I landed back in Melbourne from my month-long journey across Japan, had a lot of free time before relief teaching picked up, and made strides to realise *ReVerbal*.

I started with a survey, conversations, and so much ChatGPT strategising that I would consider it a technical co-founder. All of these cemented in my mind that this thing could be big and help teachers and students across Australia.

Exactly 4 weeks from that point in time, I am preparing to present *ReVerbal* at an Open Pitch Night held in Melbourne City. This is my first, real opportunity at reaching out to early-stage investors and collaborators.

Wish me luck!

Other milestones:

*   A roadmap

*   Software Requirements Doc

*   An MVP

*   Trademark application

*   Two domains

*   17 Teacher survey respondents

See you next time,

JJ


Day 100 or so

Handwriting notes to my grandma so that we could have a conversation was not really a conversation at all.

Necessity breeds ingenuity. This is the story of how I automated and liberated the tedious part of DJing.

After hearing about Flask Apps, I wanted to test their capabilities by creating an audio extractor. I built a prototype last year with help from ChatGPT. Last weekend I played a DJ set at my friend's party. My usb needed all the new songs I had been storing on TIDAL, so the audio extractor tool was put back into commission. But this time around I wanted to see how much of the tedious copy-pasting of links I could automate.

> “Everybody should learn to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think.”

*Skip to the bottom if you just want the app and instructions.*



A Broke DJ's Best Friend

Building better conversations for people with hearing problems

Here you witness an instance of building in public and accountability. They go hand in glove. The purpose is to motivate me to actually build the thing. The thing being an accountability tool that's personal and fun.

I like to go meta and this website is about building in public. Here is the exact prompt which generated the above image.

> "dall-e make me an avatar which represents "Accountabuddy" an accountability tool that is personal and fun which uses practical instances of accountability and AI to motivate us to persue those things greater than ourselves and those things that we forget about. Great projects that require we should let intrinsic motivation to make small compounding gains yet life gets in the way."



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Building EdTech that gives teachers time back

Building better conversations for people with hearing problems

A Broke DJ's Best Friend

Accountability - you need it more than you think