Hi! My name is

Corey Gravelle.

I design & develop digital solutions to solve real world problems.

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about me

I first caught the software bug more than a decade ago. The canvas of endless opportunity before you has been my passion since, from design, developer, and entrepreneur perspectives.

Currently, I'm working solo on spotsaga.com, a location-based posting and search platform. I spend my days wearing any combination of design, frontend and backend development hats -each with its own insight into the possibilities, constraints, and best practices of full stack app development. And with today's blistering rate of tech progress, there's more to learn each day. The more you know, the more you know you don't know. You know?

Previously, I was the resident designer at meetyl.com, a fintech startup that facilitated meetings between public company reps and investors through an innovative online platform. My assignment was user experience across the board - from app design and user testing, to banners and brochures. Limited developer resources meant distilling business requirements to simple yet obvious and reusable designs, minimizing technical debt potential and maximizing maintainability.
Apart from choreographing pixels and coding programs, I'm a fan of the great outdoors, be it hiking the wilderness or backyard gardening, and believe the key to both happiness and inner peace is balance. There's infinite to discover and learn online, and infinite more out in the real world!

I've designed and deployed some websites as a freelancer, and occasionally have the bandwidth for additional part-time work - send me a message if you could use a hand, or just to say hi! 👋

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JavaScript

TypeScript

Angular

RxJS

Node.js

HTML5

SCSS

Ruby

Rails

Sidekiq

PostgreSQL

NoSQL

NGINX

Digital Ocean

Sketch

Webflow

- some recent work -

spotsaga.com

"the story of anywhere" - a location-based posting platform and map-based search engine interface.
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the problem: There should be a better way to discover location-based content - without switching apps or platforms with every topic. On the flip side, content generators should be able to reach an audience based on their interest in the content location.

‍the solution: an intuitive content editor for creating posts or editing community-supported data, and a map-based search interface for discovering posts and collections by location.

the problem
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‍Travel bloggers, small business owners, and content creators in general post online and share with the world, but are often looking for a local audience - tourists, locals, or others that have interest in the posted location. Furthermore, map based platforms as we know today offer a narrow focus, with limited results; only hiking trails, only businesses, only certain podcasts, only certain articles. There should be a better way to discover location-based content - without switching apps or platforms with every topic.

‍the solution

‍Spotsaga is based on a simple constraint: public posts must include a location. Its core consists of an intuitive content editor for creating posts or editing community-supported data, and a map-based search interface for discovering posts and collections by location. Anyone can create and publish posts, which may include links to websites, embedded images, or other media. Anyone can create collections of posts, locations, or even collections, and optionally publish and share them. Search result curation is socially based through upvoting or flagging content, or the author’s verified followers and community contribution.

In upcoming iterations, users will be able to add a wide variety of public or private tags to items, opening the possibility for filtering to any granularity. Factual items like location details, news articles, business hours of operation, and others will be collaborative, ensuring crowd sourced accuracy, while any post or collection could be as well as determined by the author. Spotsaga will aim to put locals first and allow users to democratically determine what should and shouldn’t be publicized about their locality. To encourage high quality content, a point system will reward community contributors with abilities and benefits, while limiting the reach of spammers and unverified content.
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It’s been quite the trial-by-fire as my first full-stack project, especially going at it alone, but with endless content opportunities and options for future extensions, I believe that in time this project could be the go-to resource for everything location related that isn't normally found on maps apps.

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JavaScript

TypeScript

Angular

RxJS

Node.js

HTML5

SCSS

Ruby

Rails

Sidekiq

PostgreSQL

NGINX

Digital Ocean

Sketch

meetyl.com

Meetyl was a website that facilitated targeting, meeting planning, and roadtrip logistics for company representatives their current and potential institutional investment holders.

the problem: In-person meetings between investors and company reps typically go to the highest bidder, often different from those the company rep would most benefit from, regularly leaving smaller investment firms out of the opportunity altogether.
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the solution: Meetyl provided a platform with tools for both sides of the table: targeting and logistical planning tools for company reps, and methods for smaller investment firms to be seen based on their expressed interest and current investment sector overlap.

the problem:

‍In-person meetings between investors and representatives of their investments have long been important for keeping ahead of the curve, often catalyzing a buy or sell event based on the conversation. The status quo has been for institutional investors to pay upwards of five figures per meeting with certain company reps, to the individual that set up the meeting, sometimes even in a group setting. Meetings would typically go to the highest bidder, often different from those the company rep would most benefit from, earning the meeting planning middlemen six figures for coordinating an hour-long group meeting.

‍the solution:

‍Meetyl provided a platform with tools for both sides of the table. A road trip planning interface allowed company reps to discover firms nearby meetings they already had lined up, to get more out of a day on the road. Included was a map-based logistical planning tool, to spend less time on the road per successful meeting. Investors benefited from increased visibility - by allowing each investor to directly express interest in companies via a focus list, private to other investors, while company reps could see only their focusers.

As the resident designer and mediator between the software and business development teams, my daily assignment was compromise; figuring out how to satisfy both ever-more-abundant content and stylistic demands from the business side, as well as time and resource constraints on the dev side. Design simplicity was a common solution, aiming to create polymorphic components that could be modified slightly and reused for different purposes throughout the site.

Less than two years after launching, as the platform was showing traction with steadily increasing active users from both sides, meetyl was acquired by the corporate governance firm Glass, Lewis & Co. Within a few years, the software was converted to internal use, and the Meetyl team reassigned to other tasks.

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JavaScript

TypeScript

Angular

HTML5

SCSS

Ruby

Rails

PostgreSQL

Elasticsearch

AWS

Sketch

Adobe CS

... freelance / university ...

small projects

I've done a few freelance jobs, a number of small one-page artist/musician portfolio websites, as well as worked on websites for businesses and nonprofits. Many of these have since left the web without a trace, but I found some golden oldies from the early years - some loading animations made in flash, an early image-mapped portfolio nav, and my first experiment with parallax - a navigation header that simulates rolling fog at mouseover. Also maybe my first non-trivial personal coding projects: an audio editing GUI with grouping, stretching, with freeform x-axis placement for visualization and experimentation, in MatLab.

HTML

PHP

HTML5

SCSS

Wordpress

MatLab

Apache

Flash

Adobe CS

- thanks for stopping by! ✌️ -