PotentiAE CV Builder: Maximizing Potential.

Inspiration

As immigrants who have spent the majority our lives in Bahrain, a small archipelago of 33 islands in the Arabian Gulf, we have both had a sense of a immigrant yet Middle Eastern Identity. We believe that everyone deserves the right to thrive financially and have the job they deserve and that is why we started this initiative. PotentiAE is derived from two parts: the first part is from the Latin word Potentia, meaning potential, and the second part from our home, the UAE. Together, they represent the goal of our organisation, which is to maximise potential in the UAE. It all started in 2021 when an immigrant who had just arrived in the UAE sought our help to create a CV for him as he had never heard of the concept before. We made our first CV then, resulting in a huge job upgrade for him. We realised that a multitude of immigrants would be seeking better employment opportunities and financial stability and this experience inspired us to create this initiative. Being immigrants, we have seen our families grow to stabilise and form a home here. We wish to do the same for everyone else--that we need only feel comfortable belonging to our home countries, but Middle-Eastern, too.

What it does

This web application gets key points of information about the user - such as contact details, previous work experience, highest level of education, skills, and languages spoken - and formats the data into a resume template which also gives the user the option to change the colours on the resume and to download it as a PDF. There are a few sections which utilise the OpenAI API to help the user write things such as their professional summary, job descriptions, etc.

How we built it

This web application was built using EJS, CSS, and JavaScript on the frontend, and Node.js/Express.js on the backend (as well as the OpenAI API).

Challenges we ran into

While developing the project, we ran into many issues. The first major one being that I (Marc) didn't know how to use a database (such as MongoDB, SQL) or session management to keep track of each users individual data as I was a beginner in Node.js, and this caused the data from different users to be mixed up when displaying their CV at the end, and we solved this problem by getting help from an expert online who helped us implement session management. The second major problem was when Vir had the idea to use the OpenAI API. Like many other API's, you need an API key to work with the OpenAI API. This API key was being stored in an environment variable which you could only access from the backend. When trying to use the API key from the front end, it would not work as I could not get access to the API key stored in the environment variable, so I ended up using generating a response from the API in the backend, and then sending that response to the frontend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of being able to come up with an idea in order to help people, and bring it to life using code. We are also proud of establishing problems in the code and creating innovative solutions.

What we learned

We learned how to implement more advanced back-end routing. We also learned about different LLMs (Large language Models) and investigated their applications to find out which one would best suit our web application.

What's next for PotentiAE CV Builder: Maximizing Potential.

We hope to make the AI integration accessible to use in more sections of the application, and to make the interface for interacting with the AI more user friendly.

Built With

• css
• ejs
• express.js
• javascript
• openaiapi