Introduction
When I was living in Montpellier, France as a student around 2001, I would take the city tram. I had a rechargeable card that you’d to swipe after getting onto the tram, to
validate your ticket.
People would normally keep those cards in their wallets. Often you’d see someone lean into the machine with their wallet in their pocket, and the machine would emit a “beep!”.
I had what I will call a great idea: try putting the tram card in my shoe, under my foot. The tram was coming up to the platform, I had a big grin on my face in anticipation of the joke working out. In we walked onto the tram.
I raised my foot up to the machine inside the tram, and “beep!”.
We had a good laugh, and it gives my a smile to this day. What does that say about Eoin? I prefer laughter for the little things, rather than covering up real emotion. I prefer optimism over cynicism. I respect creation over consumption. I aim to improve what I can control, and to be indifferent to things I can’t. I feel the tension between creating things of value digitally, and living in the physical world.
Personal Profile
I create art through drawing and painting. Gaeilgeoir.
I stay active with resistance training, running and walking.
See Now.
Professional Profile
I create (and learn to create) for a living, living in Luimneach / Limerick, Ireland.
I’m the founder Bitesize Irish, a business operating since 2010. Its mission is to help people learn and use the Irish language every day. Several fantastic part-time employees run the business day to day. I have learned much about business principles through this business, and it continues to provide me with creative energy.
I’ve been tech product team lead and web engineer (React, Vue.js, JavaScript). In 1995 I created my “home page”, and creating through the web has been part of my life since.
I hold a Ph.D. based on research into how companies optimise their approaches for developing software in a globally-distributed setting, completed at Lero — Ireland’s software engineering research centre at the University of Limerick.
Contact Eoin
Stuff I’ve Created Online
This is a summary of projects I’ve created on my own time. Additionally, for my professional experience, please see LinkedIn.
- Bitesize Irish makes it easier to learn the Irish language, in easy Bitesize portions. It has active members, a blog, podcast, newsletter, and extra related products for learners. It’s a productised version of myself!
- Winning the Language Battle book.
- Founded IrishGaelicTranslator.com in 2002. It was a place to ask for Irish language translations. I sold this site in 2011 when it was receiving 400,000 pages views per month. The community members made the site what it was, not I.
- Developed Irishionary.com, a collaborative Irish dictionary. My aim was to make dictionary content available for free usage (as the Irish government doesn’t openly share the country’s dictionary content out of copyright). The site had 5,000 headwords when I sold it along with IrishGaelictranslator.com.
- Developed Irish-Sayings.com in 2002 onwards, also selling it on in 2011. It was a paid membership site with Irish language audio recordings in multiple dialects (a pre-cursor to Bitesize Irish). Its audio was played over 10,000,000 times.
- Co-founded Gaeil Luimní, a Limerick get-together group for Irish speakers.