Niche Hub

Find your computer science niche!

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Demo Video Timestamps

NicheHub Demo Video

  • 0:00 Detailed description
  • 0:48 ~Demo~
  • 2:04 Potential Impact
  • 2:50 Additions if given more time
  • 3:23 Challenges

Categories

Female Empowerment, Best Domain, Education

Inspiration

At our school, computer science is one of the most dropped majors and has a low female enrollment like many other colleges. One of the reasons for this is that many students are faced with difficult courses from the beginning, or are intimidated to find themselves to be the only female student in their classes, but aren’t aware of all the careers and creative control computer science has to offer. They have nothing to look forward to, and as a result, steer away from CS. By understanding their strengths and weaknesses from the beginning, female and beginner students can be more confident in their abilities and work towards a field of computer science that they enjoy, and can make an impact in the tech world! As a last mention, because of VenusHacks' mission statement of minority empowerment in tech, as well as their hosting of such amazing opportunity, we have dedicated the color scheme and style of NicheHub to honor the organization's own colors.

What it does

“Niche Hub” was created to help beginner and female coders comfortably enter the male-dominated world of computer science, and find their niche in this broad field. Our website is built similar to a personality quiz, asking the user a series of questions that ultimately determine what computer science field might best suit them.

How we built it

UI/UX

To create "Niche Hub", we first created a wireframe and prototype on Figma. Originally, our project was called "Bit of You", but due to domain issues, we changed it to "Niche Hub".

Code

Next, we used CollabEdit.com to code our website skeleton together in real-time. "Niche Hub" is coded in HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

Communication

We used Discord to communicate ideas and responsibilities, and Google Docs to draft up the website content.

Challenges we ran into

Collaboration

This is our first time working together, so we had to learn which platforms worked best for our team. We decided on using Discord, Google Docs, CollabEdit, and Figma to create "Bit of You" together, and created a system of updating each other so we avoided merge conflicts with our code.

Domain.com

Obtaining and setting up the domain name took one of the biggest chunks of our time and was definitely our biggest challenge! We had never worked with domain names before, but provided the detailed guide for Domain.com by VenusHacks Starter Packs, we thought it was very do-able! Unfortunately, the linked guide was out of date by two years, and at some point provided completely inconsistent information! We reached out to the Slack mentor channel twice, but mentors were too busy with other teams at the time to offer any personal help! By the time a mentor was able to reach out, we were convinced we may have successfully set it up. Based on our research, propagating during domain set up can take a few hours so we decide to work on other tasks. Unfortunately the domain was still not set after our waiting time, and we were able to meet with a mentor! Unfortunately again, our mentor also could not figure out the issue after our 1+ hour call. Eventually, we decided to try the whole process again with a new domain name and set up exactly the way our mentor had showed us. With a few more status periods of “kinda working” and “not working at all”, along with some miracle, our new domain registered, giving us our website: “nichehub.tech”!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Completing our project and this hackathon!!
  • We were all pretty rusty with these languages and technologies, so it was nice to brush up on our skills.
  • Spinning up a domain!!!! (This one was rough.......... but we did it :)

What we learned

  • How to collaborate as a new team :)
  • The existence of CollabEdit.com
  • How to start a prototype in Figma
  • How to use a domain

What's next for Niche Hub

Given more time, we would like to increase the amount of CS pathways available, and do the extensive research to allow for more accurate questions and results. We would also like to add a resources page for women-centric hackathons and organizations, postings of opportunities for CS students, and links to find more information about CS specific fields! We 'd also like to create a section to share users' results with friends or family, encouraging more people to take the Niche Quiz.

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