Back in 2016, Hackbright Academy graduated these 43 women from the Software Engineering program. Graduation is always a powerful and inspiring night.
Throughout their brief time at Hackbright, the students in cohorts Ada and Grace (named affectionately after Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper, of course) learned everything they could about data structures, APIs, algorithms, and Python. In just a few weeks they created thoughtful, innovative, and impressive web apps. Read about them below!
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Allison Scofield
Allison graduated from UCLA with a double major in Applied Mathematics and Atmospheric and Oceanic Science and a minor in Environmental Systems in Society. Since graduating she has spent time traveling through Europe and coaching high school lacrosse. While traveling abroad Allison started working through several of the Codecademy courses during her free time and immediately got hooked. She looks forward to building her skills as a backend software engineer after Hackbright. When she’s not at the computer, Allison usually can be found at the beach surfing.
Project: SoCal Surf Forecast
SoCal Surf is a web app that allows surfers to check the surf forecast for the day and analyzes the beach conditions to let the user know if the conditions meet good surfing standards at a given time.
Anais Farges
Anais grew up in Paris, France and moved to New York City when she was 12. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan with a degree in political science. Fascinated with technology, she began her tech career doing IT at an architecture firm. She moved to California in 2014 and she was most recently the IT Support Lead at Lyft, where she quickly became interested in coding, infrastructure and user-experience. She looks forward to building her skills as a full-stack software engineer after Hackbright. When not programming, Anais likes to go to art and architecture installations, bike around and travel.
Twitter: a_farges
Project: ARTSCAPE
ARTSCAPE is an interactive map app that allows users to locate and visit public art in the city of San Francisco. The app allows users to find art in the city database in addition to any art-related tweets within two miles of downtown San Francisco. Art pieces can be filtered by categories and users are able to save the art pieces they’d like to visit and generate turn-by-turn directions starting at their location. Coming up, users will be able to add public art to the map!
Anne Fraysse
Anne grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and attended the University of Vermont, where she graduated in 2011 with a B.A. in English. Subsequent to graduation, she decided to pursue medicine and completed a post-baccalaureate in clinical lab science through U.C. Berkeley Extension. Her clinical experience however, convinced her that medicine was not a good fit. Determined to try something new, Anne spent a year teaching in Northern Thailand. During this time, she was tasked with teaching computers, prompting her to explore programming. While programming is Anne’s primary interest, she also enjoys playing video games, creative writing, and collecting vintage clothing.
ajfraysse
Project: OpenBook
OpenBook is a creative writing network, intent to connect hobbyist writers and inspire new, imaginative material. Through OpenBook, users can draft and publish their writing for review by their followers, or review work published by those they are following. OpenBook was inspired by own passion for creative writing and many of the features, including having saved drafts readily available for editing, were borne out of my own experience; of having an excess number of tabs open and wishing I could somehow reduce the confusion that comes with navigating between different word documents.
Ashley Hsiao
Ashley graduated from Simon Fraser University in Canada with a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration Honors. Having lived in Taiwan, Japan, Canada, and now USA, Ashley enjoys traveling, making new friends, and immersing in a local culture for new, authentic experiences to expand her horizons in life. Prior to Hackbright, she worked as a Brand Specialist at a food broker, helping manufacturers manage their businesses in the consumer packaged goods industry for retail and grocery. As a former marketer with experience in data analysis, Ashley is looking to apply her data visualization skills into a software engineering role. She is excited to work in an industry where the opportunities for continuous learning and growth are endless.
Twitter: ashleyhsia0
Project: Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs is a web application designed to let foodies track their restaurant and eating history and connect with friends. If you have trouble remembering what restaurants you’ve been to before, or what you’ve ordered at a restaurant that was good, then Breadcrumbs is your go-to app. Search for restaurants by name or address. With the queried results, you can select and add a restaurant that you have visited to your own personal map, leaving behind a trail of breadcrumbs for your restaurant history. Connect with friends to see what restaurants your friends have dined at and what food they ate. Breadcrumbs is a social media network built for foodies.
Christina Long
Christina is a California native who graduated from UCLA with degrees in studio art and Egyptology. She completed archaeological fieldwork projects in Egypt where she established her deep interest in geographic information systems (GIS) and mapping. Christina then moved to NYC and started her career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art while earning a M.A. in archaeology from NYU. During her Master’s coursework, she utilized GIS programs to analyze geospatial data over time and became interested in spatial data infrastructure. Christina’s excited to continue to develop her skills as a full-stack engineer while working with a mission-driven company. When she’s not coding, Christina enjoys exploring San Francisco by bike and reading in parks.
Project: SFparks
Need to take a break outdoors? SFparks is a web application for searching parks and public open spaces based on user preferences. Whether you only have 5 minutes to stroll nearby or long break to take a 20 minute bike ride, SFparks has got you covered. This app takes into account how long a user will allot for travel and whether they’re walking or cycling in order to identify parks and open spaces within their specific routing profile. Users can also keep track of their favorite parks and save their search results for quick reference.
Colleen Blakelock
Colleen has worked in Libraries and Software. She loves the UNIX command line, and helping people use and understand technology. As a Prison Librarian, she implemented an electronic catalog, and enjoyed seeing the wonder and pride that learning the system instilled in the inmates. In her first software job, she continued to enjoy training and inspiring people by starting a series of tech talks to give team members opportunities to share what they’d learned. Later, in leadership roles, she mentored employees and partnered with customers in finding the ways to solve real world problems. Colleen made her way to Hackbright when she found she was spending more time managing people and things than using the command line.
Twitter: groovycol
LinkedIn: LinkedIn
Project: The Reading Coach
This app allows parents to log the number of minutes a child has read each day. They can log using the app online, or by submitting a text message with formatted strings. Teachers can log in to view the progress of all their students, and have the option of submitting a text box form that will send a text message to the student’s family.
Cynthia Soto
Cynthia has years of experience working as an administrative assistant. Her organizational skills helped chaotic offices run smoother, become more productive and helped teams tackle daily challenges together. Cynthia discovered front-end development through her boyfriend and instantly felt a passion. She continued to learn front-end development and programming in her free time. She enjoys problem solving and learning new skills. Attending Hackbright has allowed her to build technical skills as a full-stack software engineer. As a female minority, 1st generation software engineer, she hopes to motivate others looking to join the tech industry. She also loves spending time with her family and going to the movies.
Twitter: dencynluv
LinkedIn: LinkedIn
Project: WOURDS
Inspired by the motivational sticky notes fellow Hackbrighters leave for one another, WOURDS is a shared chat notebook web app. Users can leave enthusiastic notes for each other on a one-on-one experience, to boost their mood throughout the day. In addition to posting notes, WOURDS also allows users to favorite notes. Users can return to this collection of inspiring notes, by visiting the “favorites” section of their profile. When a new note is received, users get notified via text message through the use of Twilio’s API.
Drew Foreman
Drew graduated from Yale University with a B.A. in Art and received an M.A. in Latin American Studies from Stanford University. Her interests in design and urban studies took her from New Orleans to Brazil with positions in architecture, education, and design. For the last few years, Drew worked in San Francisco coordinating immigration for some of the area’s leading tech companies. After exposure to so many engineering resumes and job descriptions, she realized engineering offered the perfect mix of logic and creativity, plus the opportunity to have an accelerated community impact. When she’s not obsessing over all things data and design, Drew can be found in the ring where she competes in Muay Thai boxing.
Project: Tagline
Tagline is platform for users to explore, discuss, and leave ‘digital graffiti’ on the urban landscape. Initial content from public art data, geocached landmarks scraped from the web, and audio accessed on the Freesounds API is curated according to user preferences and displayed via Google Maps. Users add comments, images, video, personal stories, historic knowledge, etc. to create a collective map of our city and urban experience. Know the story behind that intriguing mural? Tag it. Want to share a video from last night’s concert/protest/seminar? Tag it. Found the best burrito ever? Tag it. By connecting our virtual presence with the physical landscape, Tagline encourages a more curious and engaged relationship with the city.
Emily Cooper
Cooper graduated with a degree in Anthropology from the University of Alabama. She was formerly an organic farmer and survey archaeologist (among other things), with experience growing and developing plants and managing multiple priorities throughout seasons and projects. True to her fiercely auto-didactic nature, she followed her curiosity and began self-studying programming after moving to the bay area. Now, she’s looking for her next challenge, seeking to apply a creative and full cycle farming approach to a career in full-stack software engineering—creating solutions and seeing them to completion. When not coding, she can be found taking long meandering walks with her retired racing greyhound, Taurus.
Twitter: glasses4days
Project: Bark Park
Bark Park is a web app that gives users an easy way to find dog friendly parks in both San Francisco and Oakland. Users can filter to find the right park for them and their dog, whether their needs are “on leash”, “off leash”, or “enclosed”. Using the Mapbox API park locations are conveniently displayed on a map with interactive markers. Designed to be user friendly, once a marker is selected a sidebar displays further park information; including a link to a park’s website, comments about the park from other users, and park photos. Once a park is selected, users can also add their own comments and photos for any park that they’ve experienced with their pooch.
Fetiya Belayneh
Fetiya Belayneh discovered her interest in software through healthcare. With aspirations of becoming a physician, she accepted a research internship with Partners Healthcare and was introduced to informatics. She traveled further down that path as a data curator at a healthcare software startup. After moving to the Bay Area, Tiya worked at a benefit company implementing systems for tech startups. She enjoyed problem solving, issue tracking and deploying new systems and found Hackbright to be an ideal fit to expand those interests into full stack development. Tiya holds a Bachelor’s of Science from University of Massachusetts Boston, speaks Arabic and Amharic and has a passion for traveling and exploring new cultures.
Twitter: tiyabelay
Project: TrackThat
With a simple and intuitive UI, TrackThat provides order to the chaos of email task management. Has your team experienced dropped tasks? Poor visibility? Do you have multiple external trackers? TrackThat solves the problem of missed assignments and duplicate effort when tasks are sent via email. Access your inbox and create tasks to track and share with your team. Features include full-text search and email tagging. Automated notification is sent through Slack to provide your teams with pertinent task related details. Important email? TrackThat.
Kathy Ma
Kathy graduated from University of California, Santa Cruz with a BS in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology. Upon graduation, she set a goal to travel to a new destination at least once a year to satisfy her curiosity about the world and thirst for new experiences. Post-graduation, Kathy decided to attend a culinary school to pursue baking, a childhood passion. While working as a baker, she discovered coding in her spare time. Programming shared a surprising number of aspects with baking, like problem-solving and creativity. But what intrigued her the most about programming was the fact that there’s so much to learn. Kathy is excited about building her skills as a full-stack engineer after Hackbright.
Project: Fridge-to-Table
Have you ever looked inside your refrigerator unsure about what you could make? Or maybe you wanted to use certain ingredients, but didn’t have a recipe in mind. Fridge-to-Table will solve this problem for you! Just enter the ingredients into the search field to get recipes containing those ingredients. Users can also filter search results by dietary restrictions. See a recipe that you want to try, but you don’t have all the ingredients? Simply add the ingredients to a dynamically tracked shopping list without leaving the recipe page.
Katie Tarng
Katie graduated from UC Davis with a degree in Exercise Biology. Prior to Hackbright, she was a Business Development Associate at a tech startup (which was later acquired). Her technical responsibilities included troubleshooting APIs and guiding her clients through tracking pixel integrations. It was these interactions that sparked her interest in engineering, eventually leading her to Hackbright. Katie is excited about the endless learning the industry has to offer and developing her skills as a full-stack engineer. When not coding, Katie enjoys traveling, cooking, and volunteering at local dog shelters.
Twitter: katiecodes23
Project: ForgetMeNot
ForgetMeNot is a helpful web app created with the home cook in mind – built to keep track of ingredient amounts a user has within their fridge or pantry. The ingredient tracking functionality keeps users aware of ingredients that are depleted. ForgetMeNot will also generate recipes for any given set of ingredients. If a user particularly enjoys a recipe they’ve chosen to cook, they can bookmark it to return to again. Once a recipe is cooked, the ingredient amounts are automatically updated in the user’s profile to show how much of an ingredient is left.
Kelli Wisuri
After earning a degree in philosophy & logic, traveling the world, and working as a cook, Kelli returned to the Bay Area to stumble fortuitously into the world of tech. For the past 5 years, she’s built a career in communications at tech companies like Google, Twilio, and Wildfire, but she’s always nurtured an interest in coding. Throughout her career, Kelli devoted her free time to technical side projects in web development, UX research, and data storytelling. Eventually, she found herself thinking more about algorithms than communication, and that’s when she decided to join Hackbright. She’s excited to build her skills as a full-stack developer and apply her talents to problems that inspire her.
Twitter: kelliwiz
Project: Insomnia Coach
Insomnia Coach helps users conquer their insomnia and get a better night’s sleep. By collecting data on users’ sleep and sleep-related behaviors, Insomnia Coach provides users with insights that help them better understand their sleep habits and insomnia triggers. The app’s mission is to empower users to take responsibility for their own health.
Kelly Hoffer
Kelly graduated from NYU with a degree in individualized study, focusing on creative writing and photography. In 2009, after many years of running her own photography business, she moved to San Francisco and began a life in tech. Over the last 6 years, in true industry style, she’s experienced two small startups, one IPO, one acquisition, and several years at a large company. Recently, she realized something was missing and she wanted to flex her creative muscles again and be part of the making things work side of software. Kelly is thrilled to be part of Hackbright and a woman who codes. Kelly’s pie-making skills are on fleek, and she uses her ninja skills to defend them from hungry friends and her enormous cat, Jasper.
Twitter: kellyhoffer
Project: goLists
goLists lets you share your favorite spots with friends. Ever find yourself emailing the same list of recommendations for your favorite cites over and over and asking friends to send you theirs? With goLists, users can create lists of their favorite spots and curate lists of places to visit from other users recommendations. Enter all your favorite brunch places that don’t have two hour waits and sneaky dive bars with great bourbon selections and find new bakeries by the beach or art galleries you might never have known about. Create lists of your old favorites to share and make lists of new favorites to visit.
Lauren Sila
Prior to Hackbright Lauren was an English Literature Major with a focus in Children’s Literature. Her first foray into the tech world was at a subscription e-commerce company, which she was with from its startup days to its acquisition 3 years later. During Lauren’s time there she had the opportunity to work directly with the company’s customers and across its several departments. Her many interactions with the engineering team sparked a love for debugging, testing, working with databases, and developing with the user in mind. Post Hackbright Lauren is excited to continue her growth and learning as a full-stack engineer. When not coding Lauren can be found at the beach, home with a good book, or going for a drive with her dog to anywhere.
LinkedIn: LinkedIn
Project: getPrepped
getPrepped is a disaster awareness and preparedness web app designed to make being prepared accessible and user friendly. Through the use of the OpenFEMA API users can become informed of any natural disasters that have occurred in any given state (or U.S. territory), county, or Native American reservation. The information given includes the type of natural disaster that occurred, the date of its occurrence, and its location. With this information users can become aware of whatever natural disasters are most prevalent in their area. Users can save this information to their personal profile, where they can also view a list of disaster preparedness items they should keep stocked for any given emergency.
Leslye Lu
Leslye was born and raised in Guatemala, and is fluent in Spanish, English, and Cantonese. She graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Interdisciplinary Studies (Linguistics, Social Media, and History) and while there, she was the co-lead for the chapter of “Engineers without Borders”. After graduation, Leslye joined a fintech startup where she was first introduced to coding. She was quickly fascinated by programming, and decided to explore computer languages by taking online courses and seeking mentors within the industry. She has loved deepening her skills at Hackbright and looks forward to working as a full-stack engineer. When not coding, Leslye can be found hiking, dancing, or exploring.
Project: inSky
inSky is a user-driven web app that provides the ability for users to find the best flight deals for their travels. inSky is dynamic, intuitive, and user friendly. Simply enter the desired travel dates, the city (or cities) to be visited and inSky will do the rest. Once inSky has the information needed from the API, a trip itinerary and detailed information about pricing are provided. If a user finds a particularly great deal, they can continue onto the airline’s website for easy booking.
Lianne Achilles
Lianne Achilles joined Hackbright after working for two years at early-stage startups in Product Manager and Customer Success roles. For the previous seven years, Lianne was a Relationship and Technical Project Manager at Bloomberg LP New York and Japan before deciding to follow her passion for technology and move to San Francisco. During her free time, she is usually in the kitchen cooking some excellent Japanese food, day trading on Robinhood, at the yoga studio reminiscing her time spent at an ashram in India, or shooting pool with her 9-ball team.
Project: BullishTweets
BullishTweets allow users to search for any stock in the S&P 500 Index, and look at the most recent intraday trading activity, side by side with the most recent tweets on that stock. It performs sentiment analysis on the most recent tweets and allows the user to visualize bearish/bullish market trends as depicted by social media. BullishTweets provides granularity of intraday trading activity beyond the minimum timespan of 24 hours that Yahoo Finance provides. The user can click on the 1, 6, 12, 24hr incremented timespan buttons to effectively slice and dice the most recent intraday trading activity for a given stock.The sentiment analyzer uses a Naive Bayes classifier that was trained using a hand labeled set of 400 tweets.
Megan Heskett
Megan Heskett came to Hackbright with a background in startup expansion, working cross-departmentally to launch new markets. She was inspired to learn to code after diving into a business intelligence platform, finding it compelling and challenging. She quickly taught herself SQL and began creating internal tools that provided a greater access to information and encouraged data driven decision-making. Experiencing firsthand how technology can solve meaningful problems, she is incredibly excited to apply her coding skills and continue growing.
Project: Cahoots
For her Hackbright project, Megan built Cahoots — a data visualization app that provides valuable insights into your calendar. It automatically tags your events and generates data on how you and your coworkers spend your time. Cahoots also analyzes the level of collaboration within companies through an interactive D3 diagram. Users can filter by date range and calendars to see how much time any group of people within their company spend working together.
Michelle Dicks
Michelle graduated from college with a degree in Political Science and began working in marketing. She enjoyed designing and implementing direct marketing campaigns and planning various events, but sought greater intellectual challenge. After completing law school, she worked in civil litigation, and then switched to transactional law, developing an expertise in insurance regulation. All along, she craved to solve problems, but did not enjoy solving legal problems. Harking back to childhood days spent programming, she took an online class and weekend classes and re-discovered her love of solving software problems. When she’s not at the computer, Michelle is usually exercising, baking and volunteering.
Twitter: MarieCoste22
Project: One Minute Getaway
One Minute Getaway allows users to take a break. Users can select a song to hear and a location to travel to, and it will display a picture of the location while playing the song. Users can also login using a social media account or create a login within the app. Once logged in, the user can save the getaway. One Minute Geaway will show a list of saved prior getaways, and the user can replay prior getaways.
Sarah Stringer
Sarah graduated summa cum laude from Scripps College with a dual major in Psychology and French. Prior to Hackbright, she worked as a Program Manager at a retreat center in New Mexico, where her biggest passion was helping teams streamline processes and improve productivity through the use of technology. In researching and integrating various web applications, she discovered her own passion for programming and pursued Hackbright to learn tools to contribute to software design. Sarah is thrilled to be entering a field where there will always be new topics to learn and problems to solve, and is excited to apply her passion and creativity to full-stack software development.
Project: Locography
Locography is a location-based journal that creates concrete views of where users have spent their time. This app allows users to search for a location they have visited, add notes about the visit, and uses the Google Maps API to visually display a daily map of logs. Users can scroll through their journal day-by-day, filter to view activities by time of day, search a directory of places they have visited, view all their logs about a given location, or gain insight into the pace of their days by viewing charts of their daily logs over a given time range.
Tammie Kahnhauser
Tammie comes to software development from 10 years working in the United States Naval Academy library, where she developed her passion for problem-solving, from finding just the right resource for an outside researcher to building and maintaining a database to inform purchasing decisions. She started programming in 2014, mostly as a side project, and instantly fell in love with the discipline. She looks forward continuing to grow as a programmer for years to come.
Project: Hamildata
Hamildata provides users with visualizations of the way songs in the musical Hamilton reference one another. Songs are displayed on a bundle-layout graph that shows which songs share lyrical similarity. Users can select any two songs to see a list of lyrically similar lines. Additionally, users can also enter a word or phrase into a search box to get a list of all instances of that phrase across all songs, as well as a bar chart visualization of which characters used the phrase in which songs.
Aiden Ward
Aiden graduated from UCSC in a degree in Photography. Shortly after graduation, she took an introductory class in C++ and found solving problems with coding to be super interesting. After a few more introductory classes in a number of other languages, she started working for Accenture as Java Programmer. As a programmer, Aiden enjoyed applying logic in breaking down problems. Over the last few years, Aiden’s focus has been on raising her children. Recently, she took a part-time python class at Hackbright that invigorated her to join the fellowship program as a jump-start to transition back into the workforce. In her free time, Aiden plays soccer, and is a chronic hobbyist.
Project: The Better Boulder Bureau
The Better Boulder Bureau (TBBB) helps rock climbers find outdoor places to boulder around the Bay Area. It allows users to search for climbing locations and specific routes by name, as well as displaying all current locations on a map. TBBB keeps track of site specific information, such as directions, descriptions, latitude and longitude and route difficulty. Users can add a star rating and comments on a particular route or boulder. Users are able to keep track of the routes they have rated on their dashboard.
Aisling Dempsey
Aisling graduated from Pitzer College with a double-major in Theater Performance & Design. During her work as a designer and technician, she developed solutions for implementing conceptual designs. Later she worked in business management, then in Project Management and Product Support, where she coordinated workflows for clients, addressing critical pain points under volatile timelines. Aisling has relished the opportunities to problem solve, and loved how each career shift brought with it a new skillset to learn. Having always been interested in programming, she decided to make the leap to software engineering and couldn’t be happier with the decision. In her free time, Aisling enjoys reading, binge-watching Netflix, and games.
Twitter: GingerGiantess
Project: Haven
Haven allows members of the LGBT community to find inclusive businesses near them. With a search built on top of Yelp’s API, users can search for businesses that meet a certain inclusivity threshold that they specify and add reviews of their own. Additionally, using both Google Maps and Yelp, Haven allows users to see the best places near them, along with an interactive chart that shows the breakdown by type. Conceived as a way for freshly “out” or newly relocated LGBT individuals to find safe places, it aims to make a stressful and dangerous time less so by providing people with information that would normally have taken years of experience to build up in an easily accessible format.
Akyya Mayberry
Akyya has always been driven by her curiosities. They lead her to study film, computers, and software engineering. She left her hometown of Fresno, CA to attend San Francisco State University. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Cinema and Liberal. Akyya worked several years as a freelance videographer. She then got into to troubleshooting, researching, and fixing computer hardware. To expand her knowledge, Akyya studied Computer Networking at City College of San Francisco. She became a certified Technical Support Specialist and managed her employer’s website. Akyya experienced a strong connection between writing and making films and writing and building software. That connection confirmed that software engineering was the career for her.
Twitter: ajrinthemiddlem
Project: Preach
Preach is an app on the etiquette of everything with a goal to teach users how to share their thoughts, feelings, and opinions in a structured and constructive way. It is built on congregations which are groups of users who collaborate in discussion boards to address a form of etiquette, such as classroom management or any current issues that users can see as being resolved through discussion. Users set up and lead a single congregation and can be a member of other congregations. As a leader, a user is able to set principles, guidelines and agendas within their own congregation. As a member, users can actively engage in a congregation such as agreeing to posts(preach), leave comments, and report offensive activity of other congregants.
Allison Lyon
After earning a bachelor’s in physics and a master’s in education from Stanford, Allison taught conceptual and advanced placement physics in Palo Alto. Passionate about the social and emotional development of teenagers, Allison extended her work as a teacher through coaching a youth rowing team. After five years of teaching and coaching, Allison shifted her focus to rowing full time, founding and directing her own nonprofit rowing club. Recently, Allison took a sabbatical to travel and develop her own photography business. In her capacities as director and owner of her own rowing and photography companies, Allison discovered that she loved developing websites and made the decision to become a software engineer full time.
Project: Frienergy
Frienergy is a contact management system for social connections. In addition to storing contact information, the app provides graphical representations of a user’s social interactions and relationship health.
Anna Kiefer
Kiefer is a software engineer and sustainability professional originally from Washington, DC. She is interested in backend engineering and developing software scalable for sustainability and energy applications. Prior to attending Hackbright, Kiefer worked in World Wildlife Fund’s Climate and Renewable Energy team growing its corporate carbon reduction and renewable energy programs. From 2012 to 2014, Kiefer worked at Carnegie Council in New York, NY. Prior, she travelled to the Jama-Coaque Ecological Reserve in coastal Ecuador to research water quality and native seed banks. She attended NYU, graduating with honors and a duel major in politics and broadcast journalism. She loves problem solving, long distance running, and calculus.
Project: Landfill Database
Landfill Database provides users information about U.S. landfill sites, including location, capacity, waste in place, annual tonnage, ownership, and landfill gas to energy participation. When a zip code is entered, the database uses a haversine function to calculate the distance between latitude and longitude coordinates to find the landfill site nearest to the user. The application displays the landfill’s location on a map and its total latest waste in place, the percent of total U.S. waste in place that landfill accounts for, and national level data on easy-to-read visuals. The app gives users the ability to update the database by filling out a reporting form for a particular landfill.
Cristina Clarkin
Clarkin graduated from New York University with a BA in International Relations. Upon graduation, she became a marketing consultant where she quickly realized she was most interested in the Big Data analysis associated with the role. After moving to Northern California, Clarkin began working for an Email Marketing platform in a role that required helping clients integrate their platforms with her company’s marketing automation software. Because Clarkin’s clients were typically backend engineers, this required an intimate knowledge of her company’s RESTful API, triggering her initial interest in software engineering. Clarkin began building small HTML email creatives, but ultimately decided to take the leap and become a software engineer.
Project: Reservations Tonight
Surprise! Your parents are driving into the city for dinner tonight. Your pots and pans have never been removed from their original packaging and you need reservations. Fast! Don’t leave your evening to chance. Reservations Tonight allows you to find available tables at restaurants near you. Using restaurant data drawn from Yelp’s API, you can search Reservation Tonight’s database of available reservations by party size, location, desired time, cuisine, restaurant rating and more. Reservation search results are plotted on a Google Map, and reservation confirmation texts are sent via Twilio. Bookmark reservations you find appealing or reserve immediately to lock in a reservation that will appease even the most judgmental of mothers.
Diana Lee
Diana graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Economics, Sociology, and minor in Chinese. She jumped immediately into the tech industry, working for Twilio and Eventbrite in the past few years. At both companies, she managed teams, drafted technical documentation, and built processes and infrastructure for industry tools such as Salesforce and Marketo. She dedicated time to learn to code in order to expand her skill set and discovered a penchant for back-end engineering. When not coding, Diana is an avid reader and storyteller; in college, she founded the only creative writing club on campus.
Project: Park Place
Park Place enables busy drivers to find parking on the streets of San Francisco when they have someplace to be. Users can find relief by searching for parking spots based on destination, search radius, dates and times. The search checks against a database containing SFMTA’s parking regulation and geometric polyline location data, originally converted from a shapefile. Eligible spots render on the map as markers. Users may choose to get Google Maps directions directly in the app or text directions to their mobile device using the Twilio API so they can navigate from anywhere. If markers are favorited, they are saved to a unique user’s map where they can see all parking regulation data for their favorite parking spots.
Emily Dowgialo
Emily Dowgialo is a passionate, tech-minded self-starter. From a young age, Emily’s fascination with technology evolved into an avocation of teaching herself HTML and CSS. During high school, Emily secured numerous freelance jobs, developing websites and fulfilling other artistically driven projects. These experiences sharpened her skills and creative instincts. After graduating from UC San Diego with a BA in psychology, Emily was determined to enter the tech world. She began her journey at Yelp as a member of the content management team in the User Operations department then moved on to a data management role. Emily’s immersion with Yelp’s engineering teams and an inside look at their backend inspired her return to coding.
Twitter: emilydowgialo
Project: Spent
Spent is a practical and versatile budget tracking, money management app, offering users an easy-to-read visualization of their finances and a detailed log of their spending habits. With Spent, you can create budgets, set spending goals, and store information about your recent purchases. The interactive dashboard features graphs, which segment the user’s expenditures into categories, and auto updating widgets, which illustrate spending metrics and statistics. Online purchases can be monitored with Spent’s dynamic package tracking feature, which displays the last place a package was scanned, its delivery status, and plots its current location on a map.
Inas Hyatt
Inas graduated from UC Berkeley in 2012 with a degree in Ethnic Studies, and was later employed by AmeriCorps in Menlo Park, CA. There she designed educational programs for at-risk youth with the goal of encouraging academic achievement. Immersed in the start-up culture of Palo Alto, she grew eager to get involved in tech. After graduating from AmeriCorps, she joined an ed-tech start-up where she utilized SQL to best manage client accounts. It was at this company, where Inas was able to network with the female engineers who recommended various online coding classes. After one class, Inas became hooked on web development and algorithms. In Inas’ free time, she enjoys listening to podcasts, hiking, and eating contests.
Twitter: InasHyatt
Project: Camp Buddy
Camp Buddy is a fun social platform that is designed to allow coding boot-campers the chance to connect and network. With it’s visually appeasing layout, campers are able to access past written notes, and questions, edit their profile information, and search for questions or solutions relevant to them. Interacting with Camp Buddy is easy too! Once a comment is made on a camper’s question, they are notified via email the username of the camper who commented and the comment that they wrote. Campers are also able to vote on each individual response, to better reflect the best solution to a difficult problem. When social platforms like stackoverflow feel too intimidating or overly advanced, then Camp Buddy is your solution.
Joyce Lin
After going back to school for her MBA, Joyce started her career in technology as a product manager. Since then, she has worked at a startup, post-acquisition firm, and an older, established organization. Throughout all of her experiences in tech, Joyce is most excited by the fast pace of evolving technology. There is always something new to learn, a new way of doing what previously seemed impossible or cumbersome, and a new means of impacting people’s lives through technology. She looks forward to growing her career as a full stack developer. When she’s not out and about exploring her new home city of San Francisco, she can be found designing an automatic kitty toilet flusher for her 2 cats, Honey and Charlie.
Twitter: PetuniaGray
Project: christopher walken
The smartest walking app for planning and rating landmarks for urban walks
– Explore parks, civic art, and landmarks in San Francisco
– Add or save destinations to construct a walking trip
– Rate and review landmarks, providing your own notes and uploading your own images
– See recommendations for other highly rated landmarks located near your current route
– See recommendations for other landmarks based on your preferences
– Send step-by-step walking directions to your phone via email
Julie Nager
Julie first became interested in computer programming while building data models as a Business Analyst. Her strange love of writing layered Excel formulas led her to seek out computer programming, where she could work on more complex technical puzzles. Julie studied Java at and took online courses before deciding to dive fully into coding with Hackbright. Through those courses and her time at Hackbright, Julie has confirmed her passion for programming and solving technical challenges. Prior to Hackbright, Julie graduated from Stanford with a B.A. in History and worked as a Business Analyst and a Product Manager. Julie is looking forward to tackling many more programming challenges as part of an engineering team after Hackbright.
LinkedIn: LinkedIn
Project: BabyPool
BabyPool allows users to create social betting pools for the birth of a child. Expectant parents provide their expected due date and their preferences for the financials of the pool (cost per time slot, max spend per bettor, etc.). The app then dynamically generates an interactive “BabyPool” with time slots before and after the expected due date. This BabyPool can be shared with friends and family, who can purchase time blocks and potentially win the BabyPool if the baby is born during their claimed time slot. BabyPool is a fun, interactive web app designed to give expectant parents an easy way to facilitate a social game that revolves around the happy arrival of their new family member.
Katie Lundsgaard
Katie graduated with a degree in Psychology and began her career providing support for nonprofits. She transitioned to the tech world as a customer success engineer at a webscraping startup, and soon after expanded her role to senior product specialist. Katie played a critical role in planning and driving product improvements and worked with the engineering team to prioritize bugs and features. Katie was able to obtain a wide breadth of front end knowledge, and quickly became hungry to solve more complex problems and pursue a career as a programmer. Katie has enjoyed learning the full stack at Hackbright and is eager to apply her skills as a software engineer. She loves squashing bugs, knitting hats, and riding bikes through San Francisco.
Project: GastroHub
GastroHub allows users to collect restaurants to visit and reports on those restaurants. Users can view their restaurants on a map, see Uber price estimates from their current location, and mark restaurants as visited and liked. On the dashboard, users can view custom restaurant statistics, create groups of friends, invite other users, and create and share lists of local establishments to visit together.
Katie Simmons
Katie supplemented her shiatsu and massage therapy business for over a decade with contracts ranging from hardware solutions for small businesses to web development projects before transitioning to software engineering, API support and network and systems administration at a financial market data feed in Chicago. As a software engineer, Katie enjoys solving complex problems with an eye toward scalable and human-friendly code. After Hackbright, she looks forward to working as a full-stack software engineer. When not at her laptop, Katie is probably watching a horror movie cuddled up with her cats and partner, lifting weights, or trying a new restaurant with friends.
Project: HorrorShow
HorrorShow is a place for horror movie fans to create collections of horror movies and browse other users’ collections. Werewolf coming-of-age stories? Feminist slasher subversions? Wes Craven’s entire oeuvre? Get as specific as you want to with sub genres – and see where to watch those movies right now.
Kelly Higgins
Kelly holds the distinction of being a real life pirate who lived aboard a ship for four years. She sailed the world’s seas, from Antarctica to the South Pacific, battling poachers and protecting endangered wildlife. Her degree in Communications & Media Strategy launched Kelly into tech as Marketing Director/Product Manager for a web architecture firm, until she was enlisted to serve aboard Sea Shepherd’s flagship. As Media Director, Kelly overhauled the department to break web traffic records,and she served as COO during the establishment of the organization’s international headquarters in Amsterdam. Kelly brings a positive attitude, a passion for learning, and the people skills that come from living aboard a ship with 40 people.
Twitter: kellyxvx
Project: A Pirate’s Radio
A Pirate’s Radio builds custom playlists of songs centered around keywords in the lyrics. Adventurers can log in with their Spotify account, and with the click of a button have a playlist created for them based on their current location, or a journey by car, bike, or foot. If you want to build your own custom playlist, the Pirate’s Radio Muse will build you a playlist around any subject appearing in the lyrics. The playlists are saved to your Spotify account, and your personal Pirate’s Radio is ready to be taken on any adventure you dare!
Kelsey Onstenk
Kelsey Onstenk has a natural love and curiosity about the world and people, which led her to a degree in Psychology. After college Kelsey started working with children with autism, but being a lifelong learner, she also continued to take classes at a community college in her free time. Having always loved technology, Kelsey followed her curiosity and took a class in Java. She enjoyed the challenge, creativity, and problem solving so much that she began to teach herself using online resources. Eventually, she decided that a career change was the right decision, and made her way to Hackbright to learn alongside other engineers. Kelsey is excited about continuing to learn Web Development and about being apart of the tech community.
Project: Beautiful Lines
Beautiful Lines is a visual library and study tool for Artists. In a real life drawing class, a model would pose in front of a class, changing poses at set intervals for students to study while drawing or painting. Beautiful Lines aims to replicate that experience for practice outside of class. User’s can create boards and save images from online that they can then use in study sessions. Beautiful Lines is integrated with Pinterest, so that users can transfer their own images from Pinterest for use in study sessions on Beautiful Lines. Users can separately search their own images or all images on Beautiful Lines, to find references or new inspiration!
Maggie (Min) Yang
Maggie comes from a background in payments at Visa, Inc. where she was a Program Manager for three compliance and fraud related programs for a portfolio of 14,000 enterprise and small business merchants. In this role, she became the business lead on an in-house application supporting the compliance program. She also worked closely with the development team and through that became excited about programming challenges. She began exploring Coursera courses on her own, and then landed at Hackbright where she found that the problem solving aspects of programming were just what she was looking for in a career. She has enjoyed the challenges of building a web app and looks forward to a future as a software engineer and a lifetime of learning.
Twitter: maggieminyang
Project: Fare Share
Fare Share is an app built for friends living in different cities who want to travel together. It allows each user to create trips for a group of users. All users of that trip can then one-click-search flights for everyone in the group. The app uses the Google Flights API to find the cheapest dates/destinations for everyone on the trip. All search results in a trip are then viewable by all users of that trip, and all users can then vote for their preferred option for that trip. With easy-to-view Google Maps of flight paths and Chart.js summaries of the flight prices, Fare Share makes it easier for friends living all over to plan travel together.
Melissa Glickman
Melissa graduated from CSU Monterey Bay with a B.A. in Liberal Studies with a concentration in CS. After graduation Melissa spent several years working as a Build & Release Engineer. She enjoyed her work, but decided to take a break from Build & Release to pursue advanced educational degrees. She attended and graduated from the CSUJ iSchool with a Masters degree in Archive & Records Administration. Upon graduation she was accepted as a PhD student into the Gateway PhD Program at QUT in Brisbane, AUS. Melissa was pioneering a field of study based on cloud storage. While pursuing her PhD, Melissa realized her passion was software development rather than academia and enrolled in Hackbright to refresh and expand her software knowledge.
Twitter: RekordQueen
Project: Find My Food Truck
Where is that pesky food truck parked today? The app provides users with necessary information to know exactly where their favorite truck is parking for the day. Users are able to follow multiple trucks and with the click of a few buttons see a truck’s own website, yelp reviews, and twitter feed. Beyond searching current and upcoming schedules of a truck, the app also provides users with a map and a route based on their geolocation.
Monique Blake
Monique’s professional life toggles between Electrical Engineering and Backend Software Engineering. A graduate of Smith College with a degree in engineering, Monique’s work has ranged from building haptic feedback devices, to testing VSAT systems and XBee based products. In the past few years, she has also been heavily involved in STEM education. In her free time, Monique makes jewelry on the side and publishes tutorials on Instructables (member munnub). She is self-taught in several instruments: piano, guitar, xylophone, auxiliary percussion, and speaks Mandarin. In 2013 Monique received an award from the National Academy of Engineering for bringing awareness to the sustainability ethics towards nuclear waste dumping.
Project: StrollSafely
StrollSafely finds the safest possible route in NYC based on crimes provided by NYC Open Data via Google Maps. Based on a start and end location, the StrollSafely geocodes the user’s input, and uses Google API information to map out the steps in the route. The backend generates waypoints by interpolating and looking at which geohashes does the route fall under based on the NYC crime data. If the route falls on a high crime area, it checks other potential options against high crime areas and finds the safest route. The map shows the original Google suggested route and then the adjusted safer route.
Nija Mashruwala
Nija is a DevOps professional increasing her skill-set to include full-stack web development. She makes big computers go fast. And now, she does it with python too! Nija has worked with computers professionally for just over 20 years. In that time, she has had experience on every platform – DOS, Windows, Mac OS X, Unix, and Linux. She mostly uses CentOS or Ubuntu for work, and has a special place in her heart for FreeBSD and IRIX.
Project: Chatty
Chatty is a python micro-service with a RESTful API, responsive front-end, and integrated chat bot. Users can interact via the web interface, command line, or any other service that understands http and JSON. There are three major components to the service: the server, which implements the API; a one-way event bus; and a listener class. The server publishes events to the bus, which notifies all listeners subscribed to that event. The chat bot analyzes the event it receives from the bus, and posts a response to the server using the API.
Patricia Korijn
After moving to the Bay Area from the Netherlands, Patricia attended UC Berkeley. Thereafter, she earned an M.F.A. in Design from AAU in 2011. Post-graduation, she was hired by Visual Therapy, a luxury lifestyle and consulting company located in New York, where she developed Visual Therapy’s online voice. After a successful stint in New York, Patricia returned to the Bay Area to work for Gymboree, where she was tasked with supporting seasonal product development and creating hindsight sales analysis. Living in the Bay Area for years, Patricia entered the start-up scene where she created two successful companies, She was responsible for marketing, financial planning, product design, UX design and investment strategy.
Project: Scuber
Scuber is a new way to travel fast from point “A” to point “B” by scooter. This web app allows passenger’s looking for ride-share to save time and make friends on short trips throughout San Francisco. Passengers can book a scooter ride at the touch of a button and experience an enjoyable way of travel.
Scuber allows for registration by both driver’s and passenger’s. On the driver side, a claimed ride will provide the driver with the prospective passenger’s contact information. The driver can view his/her own ride history as well as the passenger’s rating.
On the passenger side, the passenger can enter a pick-up destination and a suggested route will populate. They also have access to their ride history and can rate their driver.
Sarah Fleming
Sarah graduated from the University of Missouri in 2014 with a BS in Mathematics. She moved to San Francisco shortly after where she worked as an actuarial analyst. While at this job, Sarah received her first taste of how powerful software could be. She worked in Fortran and VBA, but was eager to learn more modern programming languages and tools. The more she learned about these tools, the more she knew she wanted to pursue a career as a software engineer. After digging deeper into Python, Computer Science, and data analysis through Hackbright and her project, Sarah is excited to apply her math background as a software engineer in a field that is always evolving and coming up with better and faster solutions.
Twitter: sajafleming
Project: Sunset Funset
Have you ever been to a new city and wondered where to watch the sunset? Sunset Funset does the hard work for you by analyzing topographic data from the USGS to find the best sunset viewing locations for a given area. It does this by searching for peaks within a certain radius of a user-specified location. These peaks are then further evaluated as sunset viewing points by testing if the view is obstructed to the west. They are ranked using a variety of criteria including their elevation and their viewing angle. The top-ranked sunset viewing points are then plotted on a map along with sample sunset pictures from each location that are pulled from the Flickr API.
Veronica Erick
Veronica graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Psychology and Business. While in college she did an internship at Lagunitas Brewing Company in the marketing department and deeply enjoyed the technical side of the field. Most recently she worked at an art manufacturing company and a financial consulting firm, assisting with marketing and various IT projects. In her free time Veronica enjoys travel, live music and hunting for the best food and tastiest beers in the Bay Area.
Project: Wanderful
Wanderful is an adventure and events discovery page designed to make planning excursions more fun and efficient. Users search by location and date, and the app curates local listings of the highest rated attractions for the given location, and events for that date. Each search result includes details and a map to make navigation easy. The app helps users avoid the endless loop of re-saving and re-finding travel information, since they can save search results to their agenda to view later on a single page. Users can send themselves SMS reminders about upcoming saved events or invite their friends. Wanderful helps users save time by providing a one stop place to find, save and be reminded of all of the adventures they want to go on.
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