Flex

Flex highlights the soft and critical skills held by job candidates by exposing what’s hidden within their gaming data. It aims to do this with delight and to empower those who are underrepresented.

The insights helps employers, universities, and individuals to surface traits that are not immediately obvious. For institutions, this supplements what applicants put forward by going beyond what’s in their CV or resume (often not much more than past jobs, education and some described attributes).

I worked with the Flex founders and a small team to create the website candidates can visit to see what’s lurking in their gaming data. Gaming, if seen as purely a leisure activity, could appear to some as a shallow activity when in reality gaming is innately difficult, creative and big (as in billions of people play games). The opportunity here is especially true for lifting underrepresented individuals; be that due to education, finances, gender, race or geography.

Initially, along with programmer Chris Hipgrave (aka my partner on Trifle) and designer Caspian Whistler (aka APWOT), we worked with Co-founders Jonathan Holtby and Rob Sargent and CTO Vik Bijarnia over a six week period culminating with the Techstars demo day on 29 June 2022. This resulted in the beta.flex.game site (where individuals can self-submit for an assessment).

Since then, we have continued to evolve the the assessment site and also built out a more traditional marketing site on flex.game.

Technically, the sites are built statically with Nuxt JS and Tailwind CSS and deployed on Netlify. This is a stack that allows us to iterate quickly - branch deploys are especially useful on a project like this as they ease async development. Each git branch pushed to GitHub creates a version of the project with its own URL which in turn can be shared (on Discord for us fittingly). Others on the team can then review and comment on that specific thing that’s been built.

These steps are early iterations of something that will grow in both scope, reach and maturity.