Civic Tech · Personalization
The exact words I gave Claude to kick this off.
Build a web app where I can input details about who I am (demographics data, location, first time home owner, family, resident, immigrant, kids who attend public or private school, sports, etc) so that I can breakdown the ACT budget (look at ACT Budget at a Glance — 2026–27.md) and understand how it impacts me
How it works, why it was built this way, and the thinking behind each decision.
You answer a few quick questions about yourself (where you live in Canberra, whether you rent or own, if you've got kids in public or private school, whether you're a carer, what sports you follow) and the app scores every headline measure in the 2026-27 ACT Budget by how relevant it is to you. Instead of wading through a 25-page PDF, you get a ranked list: "this stamp duty change scores 100 for you because you're a first home buyer," "this basketball stadium upgrade scores 40 because you're not in Belconnen and don't play basketball." Tap any line to see the plain-English reasoning, the dollar figure, and a link straight to that section of the source document.
It's a single index.html file. React and Babel load from a CDN and JSX compiles right in the browser, so there's no build step, no node_modules, no deploy pipeline. All ~45 Budget measures live in one array, each with a small relevance function that reads your answers and spits out a 0-100 score. Your answers persist in localStorage, so closing the tab and coming back later restores your saved statement. A second file, budget-reference.html, is the official Budget at a Glance doc converted to markdown then HTML, with an anchor on every section heading, so each measure can link to the exact paragraph it came from instead of guessing at a PDF page number.
I wanted zero infrastructure: three static files that work on GitHub Pages or Vercel with literally no setup. No backend also meant no reason to store anyone's data anywhere except their own browser, which felt right for something this personal. The harder call was citations. I started by linking to PDF page numbers, but those turned out to be unreliable across browsers and viewers, and a couple were just wrong. Anchored HTML sections fixed that for good: every link points to a specific, verifiable heading in a document I control, with a fallback link to the original PDF for anyone who wants the primary source.
All three files (index.html, budget-reference.html, ACT-Budget-2026-27-at-a-glance.md) sit in the same GitHub repo. Deploying is just GitHub Pages: Settings → Pages → Deploy from branch → main / root. No build command, no environment variables, nothing to configure. Vercel works identically if I ever want preview URLs per change.
Where this project could go with more time and feedback.
Feedback, ideas, and questions are welcome — I read everything.