Raphaël Merx

A software engineer turned aid worker. Tech, languages, governance, in no particular (world) order

  • New Project update
    tetun.org: more languages, more users
    Added Indonesian, Portuguese, and even Tok Pisin (in beta) to tetun.org! Also passed 60,000 monthly active users.
  • New Project update
    Q&A on DFAT reports, powered by AI
    Think chatGPT, but backed by hundreds of reports, and citing its sources. Reports from the DFAT (Australian Dept of Foreign Affairs) website
  • Spoke at an Event
    A 3-min pitch on why jargon in aid is worse than we think
    Went to beautiful Canberra for the 2022 Australasian Aid Conf, and made a small pitch about why jargon is worse than an annoyance, and why overusing it makes us no better than AIs.
  • Spoke at an Event
    Talk about machine translation for Tok Pisin at the LSPNG conference
    Presented my work on machine translation, with a first translator prototype for Tok Pisin at https://tok-pisin.org, at the Linguistic Society of PNG 2022 conference.
  • New Project update
    Talk DFAT to me
    An AI trained to write in the style of Australian Aid reports.
  • New Project update
    Regional indonesian language translator
    A translator between Indonesian and several regional languages of Indonesia: Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese, Acehnese, Banjarese, Buginese, and the Minangkabau language.
  • New Project update
    Tetun Wordle
    A Wordle all in Tetun, forked from the Indonesian Wordle, Katla. Been told it's the first word game using Tetun? Thanks to Adérito Correia (INL) for reviewing my Tetun instructions.
  • New Project update
    Balinese spell checker
    A webapp to fix Balinese text spelling, built in partnership with the Balinese Wikisource (WikiPustaka) community. Useful to fix text transliterated from the Balinese alphabet to the Latin alphabet.
  • Wrote a Blog Post
    Agile, meet adaptive: How global development assistance and software engineering both thrive on an iterative approach
    I believe in iteration (and perseverance) in both software engineering and development assistance. Written for the Catalpa blog.
  • Spoke at an Event
    PyconAU talk on the tetun.org machine translator
    Mel Mistica and I presented on how we setup a volunteer-led English-Tetun machine translation service. Since then we passed 25,000 monthly active users.
  • Wrote a Blog Post
    Beyond Compliance: Approaching government transparency as an Opportunity rather than an Obligation
    Finding alignment of incentives between decision makers, data officers and citizens can make or break the success of transparency projects.
  • New Project update
    Added machine translation to tetun.org
    What started as a Tetun-English dictionary now includes a translator, using a machine learning model for translation.
  • New Project update
    Published an iOS version of tetun.org
    Over the first few months of the pandemic, I taught myself React Native and migrated the tetun.org app to it. This let me generate an iOS build which was published to the Apple App Store.