During the last four weeks of Hackbright Academy’s software engineering fellowship, each fellow uses their new found skills to build their own web app. Scroll below to read about the fellows and the projects created. To meet Silicon Valley’s newest software engineers in person, join us for Hackbright Academy’s quarterly Dinner & Demo night.
Meet Hackbright Academy Spring 2015 Software Engineers:
Alena Kuczynski, a natural communicator with a background in neuroscience, enjoys both delving deep into technical topics and making them accessible to others. Alena graduated from Stanford University with a BS in Science, Technology, & Society, completing a rigorous science curriculum along with an examination of science and technology’s interplay with society. Following graduation, Alena taught extensively in the US and abroad before returning home to NYC to work as an EMT.
For her Hackbright project, Alena built Skillit – Skillit is designed to build community in an increasingly disconnected world by facilitating collaborative learning. If you want to take a hobby or skill to the next level, just enter your address, and Skillit shows you a real time map of other users within 1km who are currently working and open to collaborating. Filter those users by what they’re working on, and when you find someone who you’d like to meet up with, send them a message through the app telling them you’re on your way then head over to meet your new skill buddy! Alena’s GitHub
Alexandra Plassaras graduated from Boston University with a degree in security studies focusing on post-conflict societies and guerrilla warfare. Afterwards she focused her career on various analytical roles including non-profit consulting, and business analytics at organizations focused on education, genetic carrier- screening and market research. She is currently a Master’s candidate at Columbia University studying economic and public policy analysis and data science. She is focused on the intersection between technology and social impact, particularly how data science impacts the social sector. She loves asking questions, learning new languages, sharing anecdotes and hiking. Follow her on Twitter @ Alex_andra_P.
For her Hackbright project, Alexandra built Ikura – Ikura helps users pay off their credit card debt. Users enter in three simple numbers – debt amount, an annual percentage rate, and the number of months to pay off a credit card – and Ikura does the rest. Ikura provides access to personalized payment plans, informative viszualizations, and next steps for users as they work towards becoming debt free. Alexandra’s GitHub
Angela Castanieto hails from the world of biomedical research and recently got her PhD in Genetics from UCSF. She became addicted to coding during her last year of graduate school, and while working on her dissertation she spent all her free time learning Python. Right after graduation she began Hackbright, and loves that she can now apply her skills in problem solving to create useful web apps. Follow her on Twitter @angiesc.
For her Hackbright project, Angela built Cartsee which uses predictive analytics to plan your next Amazon Fresh grocery order based on your previous spending patterns. While grocery delivery services are convenient, it still takes time to plan each order, even though customers tend to make similar, predictable orders each week. Cartsee scrapes data from the Amazon Fresh delivery receipts in your e-mail inbox to provide you with informative, interactive visualizations of your spending history, and analyzes your spending patterns to plan your next grocery order using an original prediction algorithm. Angela’s GitHub
Ariana Promessi earned a degree in English Literature from UC Berkeley where she was awarded high honors for her thesis on Milton’s philosophy of matter. Her research earned her acceptance to Rutgers University’s PhD program. Instead of continuing to study literature, she applied her analytical thinking to consulting for evaluation teams at Humanity United and The David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Evaluating grant impact in complex situations inspired her to seek ways to gather information more effectively. After reading about UN Global Pulse and Datakind’s data science projects she began investigating how companies use technology for social change and couldn’t resist the temptation to dig into programming and gain tools for building innovative and impactful technologies as a full-stack engineer.
For her Hackbright project, Ariana built Save to Give. What’s your guilty pleasure? Pricey cappuccinos? That extra beer? Dinners out that always end up being more expensive than you expected? Choosing to make dinner at home with friends or drink ordinary brewed coffees a couple times per week can save you enough money to donate malaria treatment packages for children, bushels of seeds for farmers, or even low-cost, energy saving stoves. Accept a challenge from Save to Give and log progress towards meeting your goal of saving up to donate to families in need. Your small lifestyle changes can make a huge difference. Save to give. Give to save. Ariana’s GitHub
Dana Fallon has a degree in linguistics with a minor in French from UC Santa Barbara. Having a penchant for analyzing patterns and structures, she was drawn to linguistics for its integration of science and language. During her last year of college, she started to explore programming for the same reasons and it quickly became her favorite hobby. Dana recently spent a year at Google as a linguist in Machine Intelligence, where she worked alongside engineers and got to experience the product development process.
For her Hackbright project, Dana built Intonation Coach, the variation of pitch in spoken language, is an important part of communication but is often one of the last steps taken in mastering a new language. Intonation Coach provides a tool to help language learners practice and refine their intonation. A user can listen to an example sentence, record their attempt at repeating it, and then view a graphical comparison of pitch contours to see how their intonation measures up. By providing visual feedback and letting the user track their progress, this app helps language learners understand the melodies of language and improve the naturalness of their speech. Dana’s GitHub
Emily Luckette graduated from Clarkson University with a degree in Digital Arts & Sciences. Coursework focused on design, computer science, and mathematics. Additionally, Emily worked as a consultant on two National Science Foundation projects for the Connecticut State Education Department. On these projects Emily revised STEM curriculum utilizing virtual world simulation, 2D/3D design, and collaboration technologies. Since graduating, Emily has been working for an insurance advisory firm in Southern California. In addition to her full-time position, Emily was a freelance Web consultant and tutor in physics and mathematics. Recently, Emily decided to revisit her computer science and design background. Follow her on Twitter @ killin_Emm_.
For her Hackbright project, Emily built Price Ping which allows users to search and set price notifications for Amazon products. The app is catered to users who hold off on buying products in hopes of a price decrease. Users can set a price alert on any product for one to five days. If the price of their selected product drops, they will be notified via text with a link to the product. Users are able to add multiple alerts, manage current alerts, and see their recently viewed products. Emily’s GitHub
Johanna Griffin attended UC Davis, during that time Johanna (Avian Sciences B.S., minor Psychology) discovered animal nutrition, and began working for Dr. Annie King as a Junior Specialist. She led research on tomato pomace as sustainable replacement for corn/soy in poultry feed, and olive pomace as an antioxidant. This opened the door to Sonomaceuticals, a sustainable food products company. Her sales experience with WholeVine, associated with Jackson Family Wines, gave her an opportunity to work for JFW’s distributor, Regal. Her research experience with SAS programming led her to pursue lessons in web development as a side hobby. During her career, she often identified how code could solve real- world problems, and now looks forward to creatively approaching these issues in the future.
For her Hackbright project, Johanna built Poultry Watch Consumer Guide for Walmart which is a web app designed for Walmart customers to easily communicate their preferences on poultry meat items sold at their local store. How does a giant like Walmart listen to your opinions on how your chicken is raised? How do they satisfy all of their customers when we are clearly unique, special snowflakes, and we all have our own preferences? How do they adjust in order to communicate their values to their unique consumer? Enter Poultry Watch. Johanna’s GitHub
Judy Chau graduated from UC San Diego with a degree in Urban Studies and Planning where she was introduced to census data and geospatial technology. While working at a local non-profit and interning at the City of Morgan Hill, she took classes to enhance her technical skills in GIS. She soon worked for Apple Maps as a GIS technician on the data team. As she provided technical support for Apple engineering teams, Judy was fascinated by computer programming capabilities and big data. Judy’s passion for learning and her ability to do more lead her to pursue a career in software engineering. After Hackbright, Judy plans to continue building her skills as a full stack developer in the Bay Area. Follow her on Twitter @ judazzzle.
For her Hackbright project, Judy built Mapster – With so many things to see, do, and eat, Mapster provides a spatial reference for travelers to efficiently plan their trips. Users can search for something to do, compare and research the results, and save the location to their map where they can view and customize it to their liking. Judy’s GitHub
Julie Haehn returned to her love of tech to build new experiences after more than a decade of producing games and helping artists understands programmers (and vice versa!). After Hackbright she is looking to make a contribution in technological infrastructure, as well as end user experience, and UI elegance. Julie is passionate about learning new technologies. In her spare time she is actively pursuing certification as a Flat Track Roller Derby Official with the moniker of Rules Verne.
For her Hackbright project, Julie built Track Side Stats, which is an app for collection of derby action stats during gameplay. Currently there is no elegant method to track the blocker actions, and so we have no way of knowing (with data) how good each blocker on a team is. She plans to solve this by giving announcers and fans ways to talk about performance with data. Julie’s GitHub
Kathleen Eve is a Prep for Prep alumna, and Middlebury College graduate with a double major in Mandarin, and Sociology. Her background in legal recruiting, voice and data networking sales, and teaching demonstrates her love for learning, and facing new challenges. Kathleen’s increased exposure to technology in her roles as a research analyst, and a business development associate piqued her interest in programming. This interest snowballed into a passion and on a leap of faith Kathleen found herself on the opposite coast in the heart of the sunny Silicon Valley. Hackbright provided Kathleen an opportunity to redefine herself as a software developer. When Kathleen’s not at the computer she is learning a new language, or hiking with her husband and hound!
For her Hackbright project, Kathleen built Every Breath of the Way, a personalized monitoring tool for users to gain greater insight into their Asthma. Every Breath of the Way allows users to track their asthma attacks with ease- providing users an online up-to-date log of their health. Through the asthma dashboard users can unveil trends regarding frequency, common triggers, and symptoms of attacks. Users can share attack information with their primary physician, providing the physician a platform from which to make more informed decisions on how to best manage their patients asthma. Kathleen’s GitHub
Keirra Hall considers herself an adventurer and a “Jane of All Trades”. Originally hailing from Providence, Rhode Island, Keirra came to San Francisco on vacation in 1999 and never went home. This experience has taught her how to work hard to manifest her dreams. Her professional experience has ranged from Residential Treatment Counselor to Sex Educator to Professional DJ to Director of Retail Services. This also includes over 15 years of Sales Management and Customer Service. Due to her love of technology and creating things, her latest adventure has led her to Hackbright, where she feels all of her professional and creative passions have come together to create a stimulating new life path, which she is excited about embarking upon. Follow her on Twitter @TheBlkOrkkid
For her Hackbright project, Keirra built Armchair Activist, an application that allows individuals who are interested in giving back to the community an opportunity to discover nonprofits that may be inspiring to them. It allows users to search by category and zip code to identify causes that they may want to become involved with. Through this web application, the public will be able to donate directly to the charity of their choice or discover and join volunteer opportunities in their local area. Not everyone can protest on the front lines, but anyone can be an Armchair Activist. Keirra’s GitHub
Kristine Morinaka thrives on the excitement of new experiences. She moved 3000+ miles to study at the University of Hawaii, where she graduated with a BA in Sociology. She continued her education in social behavior while working with children with autism. She enjoyed the unique problem-solving challenge of implementing applied behavior analysis (ABA) strategies to teach new skills and shape behavior. The increasing impact of technology on social behavior sparked Kristine’s interest in computer programming, which ultimately led her to Hackbright. She loved the hands-on learning experience, and is constantly improving her skills. Kristine is excited to join other female software engineers changing the ratio in tech! Follow her on Twitter @kristinebean_.
For her Hackbright project, Kristine built Off the Chain – a search engine that highlights the small, local businesses in your community. Big corporations are constantly opening up new locations and running out independently owned shops. It’s hard to compete with brand names that are known throughout the country. For those of you that want to support the business owners in your area and contribute to the local economy, Off the Chain can help you find alternative businesses that have the service, product or meal you are looking for. Kristine’s GitHub
Leslie Castellanos is a motivated full-stack web developer. Originally from Mexico City and California and a graduate of Pomona College in southern California, she joined Hackbright after a long career in nonprofit fundraising and management. Her past work included front end web development for both her nonprofits and for freelance clients. A passion for new challenges and creative, product-oriented work led her to full stack web development. Leslie brings proven skills in logistics and cross-functional management. Her past projects have been deadline-driven with changing requirements and expectations. Her success has come from being responsive and resourceful and she is eager to be a part of a strong development team. Follow her on Twitter @leskat47.
For her Hackbright project, Leslie built Brew Day which is both a repository for beer recipes and a brew day guide. Users can access recipes shared from other users and add their own to share or for their own use. New recipes can be added manually, uploaded, or be created based on existing recipes by making a new version. All forms give users a comprehensive selection of recipe ingredients to build their recipe. The brew day guide organizes the brew by time, provides timers and calendar reminders, and tracks users’ notes and rating of their beer. Users can see an overview or search their current/completed brews. Leslie’s GitHub
Lindsay Grizzard earned her bachelors from Humboldt State University with an Art degree emphasizing in Graphic Design and Art History. She has been working in design and physical user experience for over 4 years. During this time she was appointed the Director of three fine arts galleries, created a profitable graphic design company and instructed interns in design and film software. While working as a graphic designer, Lindsay began exploring basic web design to integrate into her business which led to an immediate passion for code and intensive self-study. She hopes to use her increasingly sophisticated developer skills to create exciting user experiences on the web and full-stack web development implementations. Follow her on Twitter @lindsayrusd.
For her Hackbright project, Lindsay built ArtUP – Behind the scenes of every thought provoking art exhibition lies hundreds of hours of laborious exhibition design and monotonous calculations. ArtUp alleviates this tedious task of mathematically determining wall art placement. From the erudite curator to the DIY weekend warrior, ArtUP lets you focus on creative decision making so the Art can continue to inspire. Lindsay’s GitHub
Michele Lee most recently worked for First Databank, a company that leverages drug data for decision making by healthcare professionals. As a liaison between the FDA, drug manufacturers, and healthcare professionals, she worked closely with software developers. She witnessed the rapid development of the healthcare industry through the constant implementation of new technologies and improvements among common digital-health practices. It was through this that Michele found a passion for technology. In this role Michele gained experience with implementation, data parsing and SQL databases. Michele is excited to continue exploring technology and problem- solving as a software engineer. Follow her on Twitter @_michelelee_.
For her Hackbright project, Michele built MedDr – a cloud sourcing platform that allows users to share their experiences of using particular prescriptions or over-the-counter drugs. After identifying a specific drug by key features such as manufacturer, national drug code and strength, users indicate side effects, effectiveness, and an overall rating. In addition, users can view FDA approved labeling and drug facts including indications, adverse reactions and general precautions. MedDr provides vital information for consumers to make informed decisions about the medications they take. Michele’s GitHub
Natalie Garcia graduated from a highly selective writing studio program at the University of British Columbia. A writer’s dream is to continue collecting rich experiences and gaining more knowledge. To that end, Natalie has traveled most of the world and taken on a variety of roles across industries. Snapshots include: touring Europe as the production manager for a performance artist, joining a bellydance troupe in South Korea (while teaching English), and working remotely as a telecom consultant in Buenos Aires. When everything is fascinating, it is easy to quickly become an expert and an indispensable part of any team.
For her Hackbright project, Natalie built Apptivist – an interactive news site for passionate activists to participate in current events. Apptivist creates a pipeline for direct action when readers are inspired by the news they read. No longer will a reader be limited to “like”, “share”, or “comment” on a story that interests them. Now, when users post an article on the Apptivist site, the article automatically links to real world activities— enabling readers to find related in-person events, charities seeking support, and pertinent contact information of local government representatives. The site also stores and tracks usage information so that users can visualize their impact. Natalie’s GitHub
Nicole Rinn before Hackbright was the wholesale manager at a jewelry design company. She worked with buyers and showrooms all over the world, assisting with merchandising, and order processing for tiny boutiques and huge, well known accounts like Urban Outfitters and Paul Smith. Nicole worked closely with the CEO, creating and implementing sales and marketing campaigns. She designed media campaigns with Mail Chimp 2-4 times a month. While working with programs like QuickBooks and Fishbowl, Nicole noticed the need for more efficient solutions for automated systems. She started producing CRMs and became interested in data science. A long-time research fanatic, Nicole is interested in predictive analytics and trend forecasting. Nicole has a B.A. in Sociology from UC Santa Cruz.
For her Hackbright project, Nicole built Glow BB. South Korea has become known for innovative skin care. Incorporating ingredients like snail mucous and bee venom, their skin care industry boasts over $10 billion in sales annually. Well known U.S. stores like Sephora, Urban Outfitters, and Target have begun carrying many popular brands. The products are known for being both effective and reasonably priced. The skin care routines commonly include 7-12 steps, each meant to address a specific purpose. Glow-BB helps the consumer pinpoint products best suited for their needs with personalized product recommendations. Users can review existing products, and add new product discoveries to share with others. Nicole’s GitHub
Pam Mangan graduated from Indiana University with a Masters in Nonprofit Administration. She has worked with many nonprofits within public health, arts, education, technology, and finance sectors. During her time in the nonprofit sector, she became increasingly aware of the growing nonprofit technology gap. In response to this, she began working for technology-based companies that interfaced with nonprofits. For the past two years, she has worked at Indiegogo as the Nonprofit Campaign Specialist providing large-scale nonprofit campaigns with fundraising strategy (social media engagement, donor tracking, campaign layout/copy, campaign analytics). Pam is looking to work on nonprofit software development as a Product Manager while continuing her studies in development in order to eventually build her own first-rate CRM application.
For her Hackbright project, Pam built Tally, A CRM (constituent relationship management) SQL database app for successful nonprofit fundraising. Tally provides the ability to track/create donor records, contribution records, and fundraising campaigns. There is a reporting component that provides key insights about the organization’s fundraising data. Tally has been been designed to be a straightforward, intuitive app that simplifies the fundraising-tracking process in order to encourage quick adoption. Tally’s flexible search options make it possible for records to be easily accessed and edited while reducing the prevalence of duplicate records. Pam’s GitHub
Rachelle Dunn has always been interested in creating beautiful things. Armed with a fine art degree in painting from the University of Florida, she found that her eye for aesthetics lends itself well toward design. At her last position, a week after being hired as a visual designer at a small design studio, the lead developer left and the option was open to fill the position. She dove in with the help of Lynda, and quickly fell in love with frontend development, yet continually wanted to know more. Rachelle looks forward to utilizing her previous visual and frontend experience alongside her new backend skills as a full-stack developer. Follow her on Twitter @rchdnn.
For her Hackbright project, Rachelle built Talkalog – the easiest way to capture stories, destination memos, and audio recordings on-the-go. Users can send requests to capture oral histories from family, or use it to create audio blogs on the web or with a simple phone call. Transcript generation and rich text formatting allows these stories to be starting points for beautiful blog posts, recipe books, emails, scripts, novels, and more. Rachelle’s GitHub
Rebecca Powell graduated from Dartmouth in 2012 with a degree in Economics. After college, she moved to Madison, WI to work as an Implementation Consultant/Project Manager for Epic Systems, travelling almost every week to different hospital systems across the nation and implementing the Claims and Electronic Remittance subset of Epic’s billing software. She moved to the Bay Area in January 2014 to work for Medallia, a Customer Experience Management SaaS company based in Palo Alto. In addition to managing clients, she led several technical projects, including building many beta reports that are now standard in Medallia’s product. She hopes to work in data science and eventually become a technical product manager.
For her Hackbright project, Rebecca built Break It Up, an easy way to split expenses with another person. Users can log information about charges, upload associated images (stored on S3), and pay one another back using Venmo or Square Cash. Users can also upload a picture of their receipt, select the total, and process the image (using Tesseract-OCR) to default the total onto the charge form. Rebecca’s GitHub
Sadie Wilhelm comes to software engineering from a quantitative background, first in education and then tech. After graduating from Stanford with a B.A. in Econ, she pursued her dream of being a high school math teacher and then ultimately founded a math tutoring business for girls. Five years later and ready for a new challenge, she joined the BI team at AdRoll, where her exposure to and passion for coding began. Success there earned her a promotion, which brought an increase in meetings and a decrease in programming time, and she realized that she truly wanted to be coding constantly. Because her beagle protests switching dog walkers, Sadie will search for software engineering jobs in the Bay Area upon Hackbright completion.
For her Hackbright project, Sadie built Pensive Passport – a travel app that assists the indecisive traveler in making data-driven decisions. Once the user has chosen travel options and dates, PP gathers airfare, weather, cost of living, and Michelin star data. Based on this, PP’s scoring algorithm suggests an initial destination. The user may then adjust the relative importance of food/weather/cost, and PP’s algorithm will interactively recalculate her destination. Once satisfied, the user can explore the “winning” city through a selection of prominent city attractions, as well as peruse PP’s additional featured recommendations. Sadie’s GitHub
Sarah Foregger holds a PhD in Communication, specializing in persuasion, information processing, and attitude change. Her dissertation was the first quantitative study to explore the motives underlying Facebook user behavior. Craving a faster pace after 4 years as a tenure-track professor, Sarah transitioned her expertise to industry, focusing on user experience and consumer insights. Realizing that she wanted to bridge the gap between UX research and behavioral metrics, Sarah sought out Hackbright to gain the programming knowledge to leverage big data. Outside of her fascination with measuring behavior, Sarah is also a published cake decorator and fosters cocker spaniels (but will accept dogs of all types). Follow her on Twitter @sarahfo.
For her Hackbright project, Sarah built HouseHunter which employs MLS listings and the Yelp API to allow house hunters to pinpoint available listings that are within walking distance to businesses that are key to living a healthy and satisfied life. Users can browse and visit links to homes that fall within a walkable radius. Information is represented visually, easing the decision-making for users faced with a life-changing purchase. Sarah’s itHub
Shabnam Emdadi graduated with highest distinction with a double major in Economics and Political science from the University of North Carolina in 2012. Upon graduation, she worked as an economic consultant for Analysis Group, where she was tasked with performing data modeling and statistical analyses in order to value patented features in consumer technology. While she enjoyed the analytical rigor of the position, as well as the opportunity to do statistical coding in programs such as SAS and STATA, she realized that what she truly sought was the opportunity to implement technology, rather than evaluate it. Shabnam hopes to use her data modeling and analytical experience to contribute to an awesome development team through a back-end or data science role. Follow her on Twitter @shab_emdadi.
For her Hackbright project, Shabnam built CrimeSF, an interactive crime mapping app that seeks to analyze and present the massive amount of available crime statistics in a digestive manner for users. The app allows users to customize the data shown in maps and data graphics to what is most useful to them. Users have the opportunity to contribute to the platform, reporting incidents they witness, updating the app in realtime. Finally, the app allows users to take advantage of crime data in route planning, showing users crime incidents around their journey to a destination and allowing them to bypass these hotspots by setting alternative routes. Shabnam’s GitHub
Stella Odewumi has always loved immersing herself in new experiences. A recent graduate from Wellesley College with a major in Economics and minor in Sociology, she co-founded an online menswear company for fashionable men who have trouble finding affordable clothing in her junior year. During this process, Stella realized she needed to expand her technical skill set, and proceeded to take a front-end development course her senior year. She continued self-studying programming in Beijing. After Hackbright, she intends to become a back-end engineer.
For her Hackbright project, Stella built Gutenhub, an app that allows for collaborative translation of literary works. It is designed for language learners as well as people who want to form communities to translate books into other languages. A user can form a group and select a book from the Project Gutenberg corpus, and the raw text is split into manageable sections. The app keeps track of which translation belongs to which paragraph and renders all changes to the text in real time to other members in the user’s group. Stella’s GitHub
Theresa Cay is a recent graduate from the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign with a degree in Molecular & Cellular Biology. From working as an undergraduate researcher in a microbiology laboratory to spearheading the TEDxUIUC conference, she has led alongside of 59 individuals and managed 228 persons, affecting over 700 people on a local, national, and international levels. Upon graduation, she attended the TEDMED conference under a scholarship and was one of 20 to participate in an event at NASA’s Ames Research Center. There, she fell in love with the endless possibilities of technology and aspires to apply her technical, analytical, and leadership skills as a full-stack software engineer. Follow her on Twitter @theresa_clare.
For her Hackbright project, Theresa built Mineralchemy, designed for new and old rockhounds alike, Mineralchemy expedites the process of collecting minerals. This app aggregates listings from Etsy, eBay, and MinFind based on the user’s search specifications of keywords and price range. Users can save a listing by adding it to their favorites, which can be viewed in their account page for future use. Furthermore, Mineralchemy doubles as an educational tool by constructing a full visualization of the classification of minerals. With this, users can discover new minerals and those they may potentially be interested in. Theresa’s GitHub
Tiffany Williams recently completed her PhD in cancer biology at Stanford University. Her graduate work focused on finding new therapeutic targets for metastatic melanoma. She came to Hackbright to apply her research and mad-scientist- in-the-lab skills to software engineering. She’s excited to support companies in disruptive technologies ranging from digital health to data analytics verticals. Working on her project, Tiffany has uncovered a passion for leveraging natural language processing (NLP) to influence how people retrieve and interact with information. Her project explores this idea through using NLP and machine learning to help users enrich their lives through literature discovery. Follow her on Twitter @TWilliamsPhD.
For her Hackbright project, Tiffany built wunderLand. A good book transports readers to another place. wunderLand is an app for users looking for a novel way to discover books. With wunderLand, a user can search for new books based on a location that interests them. The user is presented with books that are associated with the queried location. This book discovery experience is deepened by intuitive results that provide additional suggestions that may entice the reader. These clusters of recommended books are generated based on natural language processing and additional analysis of the text of each book’s description. Tiffany’s GitHub
Vi Le spent her undergraduate years researching neurotransmitter modulation in decapod crustaceans and writing award-winning poetry. After graduation, she became the second most popular English-speaking television emcee in Vietnam, where she covered international events and served as the producer and host of two food and lifestyle series. On her return to the US, Vi transitioned into a career in online advertising. Working in user acquisition, she developed an interest in user behavior and traffic fraud and began teaching herself how to program in order to better investigate these issues from a more technically rigorous perspective.
For her Hackbright project, Vi built FlavorNet which performs complex analysis on recipe and flavor compound datasets to determine what foods go well together. By modeling the relationships between flavor compounds, ingredients, ingredient prevalence, recipes and regional cuisines, users are able to discover new, possibly non-intuitive flavor combinations or ingredient substitutions. Combinatorial analysis also allows users to experiment with mapping flavor profiles within the context of a given cuisine. Vi’s GitHub
Viola Olayinka has always been driven by analytical thinking and problem solving. She earned her degree in Business Legal Studies and Entrepreneurship from Temple University. In her last role at political advocacy startup FWD.us, she analyzed data to provide actionable insights on user behavior and strategies for growth and product placement in new channels. Her greatest joy in this role was creating sharable infographics. After moving to the SF Bay Area in June 2014, she began studying programming in her free time with Girl Develop It. Follow her on Twitter @violadolayinka.
For her Hackbright project, Viola built The Hunt to minimize the chaotic experience job seekers face. The Hunt provides a fun and interactive website for a job seeker to easily track, view and organize successful job applications. The Hunt lets a user bookmark job vacancies/listings, track progress on active job applications, store relevant supporting documents for a job application and take notes during the interview process. Viola’s GitHub
Meet the talented Spring 2015 graduating class of software engineers on Wednesday, June 17th at Hackbright Academy’s quarterly Dinner & Demo Night in San Francisco! You’ll see project demonstrations from students, network with women in the industry, and learn more about Hackbright Academy’s software engineering fellowship.