Aoife Byrne
localnews.ie — Carlow

1 July 2026

To whom it may concern,

This letter confirms that Aoife Byrne completed the first cohort of The Academy — Built In Ireland's cooperative-project programme — working on localnews.ie under my mentorship between 2 June and 27 June 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 and county pages sourced from a growing network of regional publishers. Aoife joined the cohort as a vibe coder: her job was to use AI-assisted tooling to build a functional scraper for County Carlow sources, with no assumed prior coding experience.

What Aoife shipped

• A working RSS scraper for the Carlow Nationalist, outputting clean JSON directly into the localnews.ie manifest pipeline. The scraper normalises publication dates, strips syndicated national content, and runs daily via a scheduled launchd task. It has been in production since week three of the cohort.
• Three Carlow town pages — Carlow town, Tullow, and Bagenalstown — wired into the scraper output and the existing town-alias registry. Each page follows the standard JSON-LD CollectionPage structured-data block used across the site.
• A short internal writeup documenting the scraper's architecture and the alias entries she added, left in the project notes for the next cohort.

Impact

Aoife's three town pages collectively serve approximately 290 unique visitors per week (Matomo, last 14 days as of issue date). Her Carlow Nationalist scraper has ingested 183 stories since going live. The scraper runs without intervention from the original author.

How she worked

Aoife arrived with no coding background and no pretence of having one. She learned the AI-assisted workflow fast, asked questions that showed she was actually reading the outputs rather than copy-pasting, and escalated blockers the same day they appeared rather than letting them sit. She shipped functional code into production by the end of week two — which is the bar. She finished the cohort having shipped more than the minimum and left the codebase in better shape than she found it.

My recommendation

I'd recommend Aoife for any junior vibe-coding or junior web role at a small team willing to invest in onboarding. She is methodical, communicates well, and her four weeks proved she can move from no experience to production-quality output when given a clear brief. Recommended without reservation.