GrowTech

Inspiration

Over the past year, I've attended events related to technology and I have noticed that the hosts of these events always mention the racial and/or gender gap in technology. When I looked into it myself I was shocked to see how underrepresented Hispanic, black, and women are in this industry. This inspired me to target this topic and perhaps do something that may help.

What it does

GrowTech is a website that shares information that may help people get started in the technology industry. For example, it shares entry-level roles to serve as an initial milestone, a personality quiz to see what you might want to pursue, links to other resources, and statistics to highlight the problem.

How we built it

GrowTech was built using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on Visual Studio Code. Each page on the site was designated its own .html, .css, and .js file. The navigation bar was also given its own .css file. This was done to help organize the program and make it easier to read and update. I used what I've learned about web development over the past few months and took the opportunity to try some new things. For the first time ever I used a JavaScript library known as Chart.js.

Challenges we ran into

Most of the challenges I ran into were related to formatting. For instance, when using Chart.js, no matter the CSS I implemented, the chart would not appear the way I wanted it to on the page. I resolved this by using !important to override previous styling rules. I also had a hard time adding vertical padding to the anchor tags, but after changing the display property to block I was able to format these tags the way I intended.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was my very first personal project, so I am very proud to have made it. Previously I had only done projects for classes or a summer program I was in. I'm also proud to have learned how to use Visual Studio Code, this will surely help me out a lot in the long run.

What we learned

While building GrowTech I have utilized so many new things for the first time. For instance, with this project, I used Visual Studio Code for the first time, learned how to use a live server extension, use a JavaScript library like Chart.js, how to format padding around anchor tags, and how to implement styling rules in HTML files.

What's next for GrowTech

Currently, GrowTech is very small regarding content and resources, so the plan is to get feedback from users and expand it to their needs. I have hopes of this website growing to the point where it may be of help to minority groups trying to get into technology. If not help, at the very least I hope this website can increase awareness of the racial and gender gaps in the technology sector.

Built With

• bulma
• css
• html
• javascript
• visual-studio-code