Pardi Gras

Pardi Gras was developed as a thesis project for a New Orleans-based bootcamp that I attended through much of 2023 and into early 2024. Pardi Gras was inspired by my team’s frustrations with navigating Mardi Gras (specifically the bathroom situation—a problem exacerbated by costumes), but this kind of thing should work for almost any large event or festival. Pardi Gras essentially fills a knowledge gap that all attendees at large public events must overcome to have a good time.

Pardi Gras empowers attendees at large public events to share their knowledge of and experiences at an event with one another. It leverages features of both social media and map applications to improve events by creating community and reducing friction: crowd-sourced content provides relevant information about event activities and the locations of your friends, points of interest and essential services.

The Native App — React Native

After six weeks of development in the bootcamp, my team presented Pardi Gras during our bootcamp cohort’s graduation ceremony, and we received a lot of positive feedback. It turns out many a New Orleanian could relate to feeling lost in the Mardi Gras sauce, and our audience and the bootcamp staff encouraged my team to keep working on the app.

Since graduating I’ve spearheaded the transition of Pardi Gras from React to React Native (specifically Expo). I rewrote the schema, refactored the content cards, consolidated all content creation into a single modal, and decoupled the backend from the frontend. We’re not quite back to MVP, but I like where things are headed.

Check out the video click-through and learn about the tech stack by reading my CV.

The Web App — React

The web version of Pardi Gras was built in 6 weeks during the bootcamp with React with hooks. My team of five worked for one week to ideate features and plan the database schema. I was responsible for features related to managing in-app friendships and creating events: like social media, users add friends to share content, geolocate one another, and create events. I also worked a lot on styling and deploying the app.

Please visit PardiGras.org to check out a demo version of the web app (much of the app’s functionality is disabled). And check out my CV to see what technologies I used on this project.

Freelance Websites

ScottPerryMI.com — NextJS with Contentful CMS integration

Holy crap, my brother is running for County Commissioner! was my first thought when I learned that my brother, Scott Perry, is somehow not barred from public office. (Just kidding: he’s a ham.)

Scott and I conceived his campaign site as effectively a content repository. The plan is he’ll regularly post brief platform pieces to his site and share them on social media, while also pulling in content from his social media to display on the site. Fresh content will drive engagement from the site to socials and vice versa.

Check out the goods at ScottPerryMI.com.

PaciorkaForJudge.com — NextJS

I like Steve Paciorka. He is a good dude. I met Steve at an event that I attended with my brother, and he asked me to build him a website for his campaign for Probate Judge.

Find the site at PaciorkaForJudge.com and learn more about my NextJS projects in my CV.

C# .NET

PureTraverse.City

Word on the street is The State Of Michigan is discontinuing it’s Pure Michigan advertising campaign, but PureTraverse.City will carry the torch! This client-only site was built with Blazor within the .NET ecosystem, which piggybacked off my experience working as a technical writer for a C# codebase.

This site is live at PureTraverse.City, and is great for up-to-date weather and traffic. Again, head to my CV for tech used on the site.