✓ Verified Built In Ireland reference Reference ID BII-2026-001 · Issued 2026-07-15 · Cannot be edited after issue
⚠ Sample reference. Aoife O'Brien is a fictional name used to show what a real Built In Ireland reference looks like at this URL. The first real reference (cohort 1) will appear in July 2026 at a real /references/<name>/ URL with the same format. See References explained.

Forge cohort 01 · Summer 2026

Aoife O'Brien
localnews.ie cohort

Junior Python / web developer. Completed The Forge between 1 June and 15 July 2026, mentored by Kali at Raven Design.

15 July 2026

To whom it may concern,

This letter confirms that Aoife O'Brien completed the Summer 2026 cohort of The Forge — Built In Ireland's cooperative-project programme — working on the localnews.ie project under my mentorship between 1 June and 15 July 2026.

localnews.ie is a live Irish local-news index serving approximately 50,000 monthly readers across all 32 counties. It runs daily scrapers, dedup, and SEO-optimised town pages across an evolving network of regional sources.

What Aoife shipped

  • A Python source-scraper for the Carlow Nationalist (BeautifulSoup + a small Playwright fallback for the JavaScript-loaded archive pages), now running daily in production.
  • A second scraper for Carlow Live, including correct handling of their paginated WordPress JSON API and the bylined-vs-syndicated source split.
  • The County Carlow landing page on localnews.ie, including the towns grid, source attribution, and the JSON-LD CollectionPage structured-data block.
  • Six town pages (Carlow town, Tullow, Bagenalstown, Borris, Hacketstown, Leighlinbridge) wired into the scraper output and the existing town-aliases registry.
  • A small pytest suite covering the scraper's parsing logic and a regression test for the dedup behaviour she encountered and fixed.
  • A short writeup published on the localnews.ie blog explaining the architecture for the next cohort.

Impact

As of this letter's date, Aoife's six town pages collectively serve approximately 410 unique visitors per week (Matomo, last 14 days). Her Carlow Nationalist scraper has ingested 247 stories since going live. Both scrapers are part of the production pipeline and require no further attention from the original author.

How she worked

Aoife joined her weekly mentor call every week of the cohort. She asked clear, scoped questions, opened her own pull requests, addressed review feedback the same day, and proactively flagged one piece of work she didn't think was good enough to merge — which we then iterated on together. She is the kind of junior who will move from junior to mid quickly under good supervision.

My recommendation

I'd hire Aoife into any junior Python / web role on a small-to-mid team without hesitation. She is technically capable, professionally communicative, and ships. Strongly recommended.

Kali
Kali Founder, Raven Design · Mentor, The Forge kali@ravendesign.ie
Built In Ireland
Built In Ireland Co-op Co-signer · builtinireland.ie Reference ID: BII-2026-001
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About the project Aoife shipped to

localnews.ie is a live Irish local-news index serving ~50,000 monthly readers across all 32 counties. It aggregates court reports, council minutes, planning applications, deaths notices, GAA fixtures and local news from a growing network of regional sources. The site runs on a static-generation pipeline with daily scrapers, dedup, and SEO-optimised town and county pages.

Aoife's work on County Carlow brought a previously-thin county up to full coverage. Her code is in production and continues to run daily without her intervention.

See the County Carlow page she built →

Tech she used
Pythonprimary language
BeautifulSoupHTML parsing
PlaywrightJS-rendered pages
pytesttesting
JSON-LDstructured data