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