Doyenne

An interactive space for women in technology to foster their interests, find a community and learn together!

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Inspiration

Tech is a vast industry. Professional connections are vital, and that's why women in tech need to have their groups in fields like IT or STEM.

Only 26% of tech-related positions are held by women, according to Built In, with 3% of those jobs being held by African-American women, 6% by Asian women, and 2% by Hispanic women. Women in STEM fields experience prejudice in the recruiting process in 48% of cases. 22% of women are more likely to have Imposter Syndrome at work than males 50% of women reported having encountered gender discrimination at work.

As a girl in technology, I have observed women missing out on opportunities of having strong peer connections and professional networks because of the under-representation of women in this field.

According to research by the AnitaB.org Institute, women hold 28.8% of the IT occupations. Women suffer from impostor syndrome and require additional support from other women as a result of the absence of women in the sector.

Even while choosing fields like STEM and engineering in school, girls are more likely to undervalue themselves than boys. Therefore, girls typically do not think about selecting engineering, not because they find it challenging, but rather because they believe they lack the necessary skills. Educational institutions, which surely contain a large number of well-meaning teachers, are directly responsible for the barriers' reinforcement. We probably need mentors, especially women role models at all levels to reflect on their own prejudices and preconceptions in order to remove these impediments.

A strong peer group not only helps people to learn better but also develops essential soft skills and leadership for achieving a successful career in technology. I, therefore, wanted to create something to assist women to have their own community, learn from other female coders, communicate and collaborate with them and also find career mentors among them!

What it does

DOYENNE is an application that allows women coders to interact with other women in technology and learn seamlessly. It has the following features:

CODING SESSIONS:

This feature enables both mentors, and peers to ** collaborate with peers , *share their learnings *, and even **teach other girls who are learning to code. We felt that this was essential because the first step towards a successful career in technology starts by practically exploring the right technologies, which can be accomplished by getting hands-on guidance from mentors and peers

Host interactive coding sessions with whiteboard and code editor, along with real-time audio and video connectivity. Participants can invite other coders to the coding session, and collaborate with them through voice and video. Also, each session has a separate whiteboard, where changes are transmitted across members in real time for better communication of ideas. The changes in the code editor are also sent to all users!

Algorithm Visualizer

This feature is especially helpful for interview Preparations as it contains visualizations of algorithms, along with their descriptions, and time complexities which form a vital part of technical interviews. This part of the application shows interactive visualizations of essential algorithms, including array sorting, and thus, enables beginners to gain a deeper understanding of the algorithms. The users can understand the working processes of the algorithms in detail and thus, strengthen their basics!

Interactive Spaces

Confused about which technology to start next? Unable to understand certain concepts? Users can interact more effectively in spaces, post their queries, get answers, and create their own spaces for learning.

Tech blogs

In the world of technology, every day there are new Advancements. Tech blogs aim to keep users updated, help them get acquainted with new technologies and trends in Computer Science, and hence, make them more employable.

Find your mentor

A mentor or a role model is vital to guide and help in exploration. Interact and collaborate with successful women in technology, seek guidance from them, learn through their experience and discover your career mentors which are matched automatically based on the user's profile through our Natural-Language-processing based model! Utilizing the user's information, the matching algorithm searches for other profiles of mentors with similar interests. In essence, we developed a similarity rating that recommended profiles based on many factors.  We developed user biographies as a test set of data for our algorithm. We used Sklearn for natural language processing and generated predictions based on how suitable a mentor is for the user.

Curated Resources

Resources section contains resources, both articles and videos, to help beginner in starting their programming journey!

Use of Twilio

Once, a mentee clicks connect to connect with the matched mentor, following email is sent through Twilio sendgrid to the mentor : Twilio Email

How we built it

This Web-app is built with Node.js as the Backend and MongoDB Atlas as a database. WEB-RTC is obtained by using peer.js and socket.io. Google search results API has been used for getting tech blogs. Python and its libraries Scikit Learn and NLTK have been used to match mentors to mentees.

Challenges we ran into

Initially, We did not know how to create a peer-to-peer connection for video conferences. However, this project enabled us discover WEB-RTC technologies, and apply them to the project. We ran into a lot of challenges, but I was able to overcome them and produce a working prototype. We were also new to web sockets and learned a lot about them. Also, it was difficult to serve the NLP model for mentor matching with the front end, which we were able to overcome by serving the model as an API. Also, we were not very well-versed with the sci-kit-learn library, and this project enabled us to learn more about it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am proud of creating a website that may help to increase the representation of women in technology, provide them with a peer group, and give them more confidence to become leaders in technology!

What's next for Doyenne

In the future, I wish to add more features, like: -> Adding interactive visualizations for algorithms like graphs and trees -> ML models to analyze the participation of women in coding sessions, and thus motivate them to be more interactive!

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