--- role: creator & builder based: Sunshine Coast, QLD practice: harvestoak.digital building: communie (Mount of Olives Foundation) contact: matthewronaldvale@gmail.com ---
This is the workshop, not the résumé. Two real threads of work sit in
projects/ — Harvest Oak Digital, the practice that pays the bills, and Communie, the one I actually lose sleep over.Open
about/the-practice.md for the pitch, or go straight to projects/. Files marked M are still being built; A means it's live.the-practice.md
about/the-practice.md
I'm Matthew — I build AI automations and PHP web applications for people who'd rather spend their time on the actual work than on the tooling around it.
Two things sit side by side here: Harvest Oak Digital, my contract practice, and Communie, a community platform I'm building for a charity my family runs. Different money, same conviction — software should make small, human-scale groups more capable, not replace the people in them.
“Our roles need to evolve too, and be regularly and effectively evaluated in order to stay relevant.”
— M.V., 2026 · see field-notes/on-ai-and-roles.md
If any of this sounds like your problem too,
contact-us in the sidebar has the details.index.md
projects/index.md
Two projects get the full write-up here:
communie.md, still being built, and harvest-oak-digital.md, the practice itself as a body of work. flynn-ai-teaching.md is the one thing in this folder that's fully shipped and live today.Badges in the sidebar follow git status conventions — M still being modified, A shipped and live.
communie.md in development
projects/communie.md
RoleFounder, product & systems design
StackPHP + PDO, MariaDB
ForMount of Olives Foundation
StatusCore app built, dashboard in progress
Problem
Homeschool families spend real time hunting for programs and providers they can actually trust, and small providers have no affordable way to be found. Communie is a directory built to fix both sides at once: providers pay a modest subscription to list their programs, families browse and connect for free.
Approach
Communie is a project of Mount of Olives Foundation, our charity — so the brand had to feel like a community noticeboard, not a marketplace. The line running through all of it: “Learning happens in community.”
Off-white
Charcoal
Eucalyptus
Warm accent
AaFraunces
AaManrope
“Your community. Your learning. Your way.”
Learning happens in community.
The Communie FlowerFive overlapping petals — families, providers, groups, learning, and events — read as one shape.
Architecture
Underneath, it's a straightforward PHP + PDO app on MariaDB — families, providers, programs, enrollments, subscriptions, saved providers. Nothing exotic; the job was getting the data model right, not showing off.
What's next
I'm extending it with a family dashboard: an AI-assisted reporting tool that matches a family's programs and learning activities against QLD homeschool requirements to draft their reports. Rather than bolt that onto the live tables, I gave it its own parallel schema — new territory can move fast without putting the running app at risk.
harvest-oak-digital.md active practice
projects/harvest-oak-digital.md
RoleFounder & solo builder
StackAI automation, PHP + PDO
ForSmall & medium businesses
StatusOngoing, contract-based
Harvest Oak Digital is my contract practice — one person, senior-level output, no agency overhead. I take on AI automation and PHP web application work for small and medium businesses, plus the training to help their teams actually run what I build.
The pitch is simple: most SMBs don't need a department, they need someone who'll sit with the actual problem, build the actual tool, and stick around long enough to teach the team how to drive it — rather than handing over a black box and an invoice.
Capabilities
AI Automation
Workflows and integrations that take repetitive judgment calls off a team's plate — without pretending to replace the team.
PHP Web Applications
Custom admin tools and dashboards built to fit how a business actually works, not how a template assumes it does.
Training
Sessions built around a team's real tools and real data, so AI adoption becomes a skill instead of a black box.
How a build runs
01
Problem intake
Sit with the actual workflow before touching a keyboard — what's slow, what's manual, what's risky.
02
Build
AI automation or a custom PHP tool, scoped to the real process rather than a generic template.
03
Handoff & train
The team learns to run and adjust it themselves — adoption as a skill, not a dependency.
flynn-ai-teaching.md shipped
projects/flynn-ai-teaching.md
A school-ready platform for Digital Technologies teachers to teach the fundamentals of AI API calls — visual, sandboxed, with separate teacher and student portals so exploring prompt engineering stays safe and values-aligned.
curlywords.com/Flynn
on-ai-and-roles.md
field-notes/on-ai-and-roles.md
Generative AI has drastically affected many roles and processes, but as it does, our roles need to evolve too, and be regularly and effectively evaluated in order to stay relevant. It's striking that some once-specialised roles — software engineering, graphic design, data analytics — can now hand most of the heavy lifting to AI.
But rather than replacing our roles, adopting AI in the workplace should be a considered, moderated process that ultimately improves workflow and output — not a stand-in for one.
The real power isn't the novelty of a chatbot; it's harnessing the same attention-driven pattern recognition in the daily grind — processing data, staff and management documents — to make the actual work move faster.
contact.md
contact.md
Open to collaborations, consulting, and conversations about AI, data and community-built software.
matthewronaldvale@gmail.comlinkedin.com/in/matthew-vale
harvestoak.digital