Inspiration: A lot of people know what job they want, but have no idea how to actually get there. They search Reddit threads, watch random YouTube videos, and piece together a learning path on their own, which wastes time and kills motivation. We wanted to fix that. CareerBuddy was built to take any job title and instantly turn it into a structured, week-by-week plan so anyone can start learning with confidence, not confusion.
What it do? CareerBuddy takes your dream job and builds you a personalized learning roadmap. It starts by asking you four quick questions about your current skills, experience level, hours per week, and learning style. From there, the AI generates a week-by-week plan with curated free resources (YouTube, Coursera, freeCodeCamp, official docs) for each step. You can track your progress, earn skill badges, share your roadmap with others, see how you stack up on the leaderboard, and ask the built-in AI assistant anything along the way.
How do we build it? Built entirely on MeDo. We used MeDo's conversational AI to power the onboarding chat, which collects context from the user naturally before generating their roadmap. MeDo handled the full stack: frontend in React and Tailwind CSS, backend with Node.js and REST API, built-in database, authentication, and deployment. Resource recommendations are extended with data from external learning platforms through MeDo's plugin and API support.
Challenges we ran into? Getting the AI to generate roadmaps that actually felt personalized was harder than expected. A generic prompt would return a generic plan. We had to carefully design the multi-turn onboarding flow so the model had enough context about the user's goals, schedule, and skill level before producing anything. Balancing the scope of features within the hackathon timeline was also a constant challenge.
Accomplishments that we're proud of? The multi-turn chat flow works really naturally. It does not feel like filling out a form; it feels like a conversation. We are also proud of how complete the app ended up being: roadmap generation, progress tracking, badges, a leaderboard, a shareable link, and an in-app AI assistant all made it into the final build. For a hackathon project, it is genuinely usable.
What did we learn? Prompt design matters as much as the product itself. The quality of the roadmap lives or dies on how well the AI understands the user, so the onboarding questions and how they feed into the generation step required a lot of iteration. We also learned how much MeDo can handle end to end, which changed how we think about scoping future projects.
What's next for CareerBuddy? A few things we want to build out: mentor matching so users can connect with someone who has already done their target career path, integration with job boards so the roadmap ties directly to real openings, and a mobile app for on-the-go progress tracking. Long term, we want CareerBuddy to go beyond roadmaps and become a full career companion from first skill to first job offer.
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