shoreham.tech: a town’s tech community, built in the open.
A volunteer-run community teaching coding and AI, building digital tools for Shoreham-by-Sea, and connecting the people who already work in tech here. Designed, built and run as our own project.
Why it exists
Shoreham-by-Sea has people who work in technology and people who feel shut out of it, and not much that connects the two. shoreham.tech is the attempt to fix that locally rather than wait for someone else to: free training that starts from zero, tools built for the town, and a network for the people already here.
What it does
It teaches. The wiki is a free library of tutorials and articles on coding and AI, written from first principles and ordered as a journey rather than an archive. The foundations track runs from meeting the community, through the basics of coding, to building a full-stack to-do app on your own machine, then extending it with a live weather reading so you learn what an API actually is and why the modern web is stitched together the way it is. A second track does the same for AI: what it is, how to talk to it, how to spot its limits and when to trust it.
It builds. Community projects take small, real local problems and solve them. Level Crossing Info gives live train times for Shoreham station, so you know how long you are going to be standing at the barriers. The Council Spending Tracker opens up how Adur and Worthing councils spend public money, drillable by supplier, department and trend from 2020 to today.
It connects. An events programme, plus a sign-up that asks the questions that actually decide whether someone turns up: how confident you are with technology, whether you own a computer, whether you could bring a laptop to a workshop, and what would get you through the door. One of the answers is “no, and I need one but can’t afford one”. That is a person the programme has to plan around, not a data point.
What shipped
- Public site and wiki platform, designed and built from scratch
- Foundations track: 4 articles from zero to a working web app
- AI track: literacy, fluency and practical use, in plain English
- Level Crossing Info: live train times for Shoreham station
- Council Spending Tracker: Adur and Worthing spending, 2020 to today
- Events programme and a member sign-up that profiles need, kit and interest
Why an engineering practice runs a community project
I am passionate about upskilling people and helping them get more technical, and there is no better place to do that than our own town. There was no tech community in Shoreham before this, so it felt like a good thing to start.
There is a commercial model behind it too. A percentage of our revenue funds the free workshops, and we can bring in businesses around Shoreham that offer work experience and opportunities to the people we train.