CodeHer

Inspiration

We strongly believe that technology should always be accessible to everyone, but we realized that most women face challenges when trying to enter the field. Through our coding journey, we quickly realized that finding the right resources, mentorship, and support could be difficult. This inspired us to create a platform that makes it easier for women to access coding education, scholarships, and career opportunities. By combining these resources together in one place, our goal is to hopefully assist more women in gaining the skills and confidence to thrive in the technology industry, no matter where they’re starting from.

What it does

Our website is a central hub of resources designed to support women on their coding journey. We offer a dedicated page where resources are organized by type for easy access. Additionally, our AI chatbot provides personalized resume feedback and offers practice behavioral test questions to help users prepare for interviews with confidence.

How we built it

We built CodeHer with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create a responsive, personalized UI. We connected to the Gemini API to create a chatbot that could assist with interview prep and resume review.

Challenges we ran into

Integrating with the Gemini API was challenging initially because we weren't receiving consistent responses. This was due to a problem with following its expected JSON structure for our queries to the API. We solved this by thoroughly reviewing the Gemini API documentation, adding comprehensive debugging and error handling, and making the necessary adjustments to our payload.

In parallel, our prompt engineering initially caused the bot to repeatedly ask for additional clarifications on every interaction. This issue was addressed by refining our prompt logic and introducing a flag that triggers detailed prompts only during the first interaction, ensuring that subsequent messages receive a simplified, direct response.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of the strides we’ve made in creating a seamless and engaging user experience with CodeHer. Our team refined the UI/UX design using CSS to deliver a sleek, intuitive interface that users enjoy navigating. We particularly enjoyed adding animations and shadows to create an interactive experience. By integrating JavaScript, we developed dynamic functionalities that provide specific career resources tailored to each user’s interests, ensuring personalized guidance. Additionally, our prompt engineering helped us specify the Gemini API to our unique purpose, allowing our AI chatbot to offer precise, context-sensitive advice for resume feedback and behavioral interview preparation.

What we learned

During this project, we advanced our technical skills by integrating APIs, fine-tuning our AI interactions, and customizing our front-end with JavaScript and CSS for a unique user experience. We learned how to troubleshoot complex errors and optimize our chat interface to deliver specific career resources with precision. Beyond these technical accomplishments, our journey deepened our connection to the community of women in coding, reinforcing our commitment to empowerment and collaboration in the tech space.

What's next for CodeHer

Our goal is to create a supportive, inclusive community dedication to uplifting women and connecting them with peers and mentors. If we had more time, we would have added a feature that connects users with experienced mentors in the tech industry. In the future, we hope to build a mentorship platform where women can connect with industry professionals, ask questions, receive career advice, and gain the confidence to navigate the tech world successfully.