What it is and who it is for
Our Stage is a website that gathers local theatre performance information into one place, so people in my theatre community can find what is playing without checking every company's page separately. It was the first software project I made public.
My role
I directed this project end to end: I decided what it should do, specified the features, oversaw AI-assisted implementation, tested the result, and judged what was good enough to put in front of real people. That is the same role I have held on every project in this portfolio, and this is where I learned it.
The problem, and why it was not trivial
Performance information in a local theatre community is scattered across company websites and social media, in different formats, updated on different schedules. The problem, as I saw it, was online ease of use and centralization: it is one big community, but it lives in sectioned-off areas. I collected the data myself and consolidated it into one central hub that links out to the appropriate sites.
Key decisions and trade-offs
What shipped is a centralized calendar with filtering and an admin dashboard. I had also planned an automated scraper to extract event details from theatre websites and social media, but I never got to it: it was a plan, not a shipped feature, and the data collection was manual, done by me. The decision that mattered most was keeping a human approval step between gathering and publishing: a person decides what the community sees.
Because I gathered the data by hand, I was effectively that review step myself, and it worked that way in practice. That trades speed for trust, and for a first public project trust was the right side of the trade.
Challenges and how they were handled
The real challenge was obtaining the data and keeping the information up to date, as a solo manual effort. Maintaining the listings was the bottleneck, and I realized that along the way.
Results
Our Stage was my first public project, built for real users in my own community rather than as an exercise. It is live at ourstage.live. It was an opt-in, community-run effort, and its users are the community theatre organizations in my area. I do not have a documented count of people or organizations, or a usage period, so I do not give one.
What I would do differently
I would change how the data is obtained. The product is meant to be community-led by its nature, so my plan is to build tools that give people in the community a reason to contribute to the calendar and make it very easy — by just taking a picture of a poster or a program — with rewards for contributing. That would make it a smaller thing for me to maintain, since keeping the information up to date was the bottleneck.