The Forge is a cooperative workshop for Irish grads, laid-off tech workers, returners and hobbyists. You join a cohort, ship real features on real Irish sites that have real users, and walk away with a verified reference + a portfolio piece. No fees. No catch. The work itself is the qualification.
Job descriptions are written by HR off last year's template. Most rejections aren't about you — they're because the company never connected the role to a real business problem. You can wait for someone to fix that, or you can sidestep it.
The Forge sidesteps it. You ship something real, on a live Irish site, with a mentor signing off your work. By the time you're talking to an employer you have a reference, a portfolio piece, and a story — and you can pitch yourself as a solution to a problem they actually have. That's how people get hired in 2026.
"Stop applying like a job-seeker. Start applying like a problem solver." — inspired by Mari Luukkainen, Herizon.io · over 30 monthly hires happen this way at Herizon
The Forge isn't for one type of person. It's for anyone who needs proof of work and a community to do it with.
Every junior role asks for 2+ years and your CS degree didn't include shipping to production. We hand you a real ticket on a real Irish site, supervised. Four weeks later you have something to point at.
Start with The Forge →The Meta/Stripe/Intercom cuts left you sharp but quiet. You don't need a course. You need to keep building, mentor a few people, and grow your network in Ireland while you interview. We make you a mentor on day one.
Mentor a cohort →You've built side projects no one's ever seen. The Forge gives you a deadline, a team, and a public reference for the work you'd be doing anyway. Stop calling it a hobby.
Ship in the open →Parent, carer, illness, career change — you need a soft re-entry with real shipping pressure and a kind community. Plus a fresh reference dated this year.
Re-enter via The Forge →You have skills the market here doesn't yet trust. A local placement on a real Irish site bridges that gap faster than any application form. We help you make it visible.
Build local proof →Old field doesn't fit, new field doesn't trust you yet. Skip the three-year college detour. Ship something in the new field, get a reference, prove it.
Cross over here →Four weeks. One real project. A mentor. A reference at the end. No textbooks, no busywork.
Browse the three live cooperative projects (localnews.ie, pubhub.ie, myid.ie). Apply via a short form. We confirm your spot within 48 hours. Cohorts are 5–10 people.
You join the project's chat and pick from open tickets labelled good-first-issue, mentor-paired, or writing. Your mentor (Kali, for cohort 1) helps you scope it.
One weekly check-in (15 min). One shipped piece of work per week. Four weeks. Everything goes live on a real Irish site with real visitors. No make-believe.
4 closed tickets + 4 weeks of presence + mentor sign-off = a signed PDF reference plus a verifiable public page at builtinireland.ie/references/your-name. Co-signed by Raven Design + Built In Ireland.
Each project is a real Irish site Kali owns and ships to weekly. You join it, you ship to it, your name's in the commit history and on the references page.
50k+ MAU local news network covering Ireland's counties. The backlog: county-specific source scrapers, dedup work, town pages, council-minutes ingestion. Ships features to real readers every week.
National pub directory built on OSM + Logainm. The backlog: opening hours, photos, food/music/sport tags, county landing pages, social-media reconciliation. Mix of writing, light coding, and design.
39-page editorial SEO play on Irish identity / fraud / PPS. The backlog: 10 new explainer pages with original research, FAQ expansion, internal linking, structured-data enhancements. Great for journalists, researchers, and PMs.
Parish councils, GAA clubs, Tidy Towns committees, charities — submit a project, we'll match a cohort to it. Members get to point at a real organisation they helped. That's a stronger reference than another todo app.
Not a course certificate. Not a badge. A signed PDF letter, co-signed by Raven Design and Built In Ireland, plus a public verifiable URL anyone can check.
Co-signed by Kali at Raven Design + Built In Ireland. Names the project, dates, specific contributions, and impact (real visitor counts on the real site).
Lives at builtinireland.ie/references/your-slug. Recruiters can verify in one click. Stops anyone faking a letter — and stops anyone doubting yours.
4 closed tickets + 4 weeks of presence + mentor sign-off. Same rules for everyone. You know exactly where you stand at week 2.
The vibe-coding wave (Cursor + Claude + GitHub + Vercel) lets non-engineers ship real websites in an afternoon. Mari Luukkainen ran a vibe-coding workshop at Herizon in 2025 and over 20 non-technical people shipped their first websites the same day. We're stealing that — Irish-flavoured.
The Forge's vibe-coding track is a 6-week cohort where you build a real site for your home town, GAA club, parish or community group. You finish with a live site, a portfolio piece, and the same reference any other Forge member earns.
Cohort 1 is mentored by Kali — founder of Raven Design and operator of the portfolio of Irish sites you'll be shipping to.
Kali runs a portfolio of 50+ live Irish .ie sites — localnews, pubhub, myid, rural, usability, themarketingpod and others. She's a non-developer who has shipped production sites for years using exactly the AI-paired tools The Forge teaches. Cohort 1 members work directly with her on real backlog from her own sites.
"You don't need permission to start. You need a real project, a mentor who'll review your work, and someone who'll sign their name to a reference at the end. That's all The Forge is."
Future cohorts will add mentors from the on-the-bench tech crowd — that's part of the offer for senior people joining The Forge.