Learning by doing, teaching by sharing. Like most software services companies we have the regular meetups, webinars, blogposts, etc. We wanted to create a common theme for these events, an app that we could use in all our demos and articles. A bit like what Microsoft did with Wingtip Toys or Contoso Inc. (Contoso), but a lot simpler and smaller of course.

So the project started as an idea for our meetup content and a nice looking demo app (no more “Hello World!”). As we were designing the demos, we acknowledged a common struggle: there is so much content for software people out there, how do we manage it all? Avoid “content overload” and still keep on learing? We decided to build a real app instead of a fictional one….. meet Amped: “Your connection to curated content”.

Amped tries to provide a couple of things:

• A common demo app;
• An OSS project;
• A community;
• A real app for curating tech content.

So far, there is just the idea and a list of a couple of fundamental requirements. No software has been written yet, as we aim to document and share the entire process: learning by doing, teaching by sharing.

A common demo app

We like demos. And we do not want to create another ToDo App.

We aim to share the entire process, not only the code. So our content starts with documenting stakeholder mappings, creating personas, design discussions, etc. and eventually we will add the first lines of code (we are actually sitting on our hands now, we can’t wait to start coding).

The GitHub readme contains a content list and schedule. Check it out if you want to read up on how we create the next “killer” app 😉

An open source software project

Sharing is caring, right? Amped is capable of curating all types of content, not just tech related. It is totally up to you if you want to run your own instance and catalogue things like recipes, books, travel locations, etc. This project is OSS, MIT licensed so you can pretty much do with it as you please.

A community

Maybe, who knows. It would be cool though. We welcome contributions and a guide is coming soon.

A real app

A real app we will develop and use ourselves. Our instance of the app will be targeted add the tech community and will be available at: https://totallyamped.tech once we have the first bits ready!

Checkout our GitHub repo for more information: https://github.com/VXCompany/amped