Hackmentor

On-demand mentorship for aspiring developers

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Inspiration

We are all self taught developers and we know how difficult it is to learn to code, without any help. Anna just started a few months ago: she didn't have anyone in her network that could help her and she had to follow online courses alone. Daniele and Brian have had some experience mentoring people, teaching them to code, but the online existing platforms are mostly focused on specific issues to solve, rather than long term mentorship. For this reason, we decided to build a platform to help apprentices and mentors connect.

What it does

Hackmentor lets apprentices set their professional goals, in terms of what technologies they want to learn. They can then browse, filtering mentors, in order to find the best fit and reach out to them. On the other side, mentors can browse the goals set by apprentices and propose to start a long-term mentorship with the apprentice. Once in contact, they can use Facebook Messenger in order to chat and work out if they are a good match (regarding the mentor's skills, their level, availability, budget, timezone...). If there's a match, the apprentice can opt to start the mentorship with their chosen mentor. From now on, the pair can schedule lessons via video call on Facebook Messenger, code review and screensharing.

How we built it

We developed Hackmentor with Angular 5 and Boostrap for the frontend. The backend's stack is: Node.js, Express, Loopback 3 and MySql. We also used Docker in order to to setup the environment faster for the whole team. The design has been created from scratch with Sketch. We use the Facebook SDK for the Facebook login.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge we had was teaching these new skills to each other quickly. As Anna had less experience than the other programmers, she found it challenging to keep up with the pace. Brain and Daniele explained anything she was having difficulties with and in the end it turned out to be a great learning experience for her.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We did everything in 48 hours as we participated at the Facebook Developer Circle hackathon 17th - 19th November in Barcelona: we met there, we decided on the project and we started hacking! We are proud of how much we have done in just 2 days (and 2 nights!): it's a full MVP, almost ready for production. Oh, and we also won the First Prize!

What we learned

We learned that if you have a good team, with the right skills, you can do anything! Moreover, everyone on the team learned something completely new to them during the hackathon. It was a great opportunity to learn something we can take with us to build on our skills. For example, Daniele discovered Loopback thanks to Brian and now he'll start studying it, because he is amazed at what you can do with it and how it helps save you time.

What's next for Hackmentor

We really enjoyed working on this project and we think it has a good chance of becoming a real product. We plan to add some new features like:

  • Sessions scheduling
  • Payments
  • Mentor onboarding

We would also like to add more Facebook integrations:

  • Recommend local developers groups
  • Identify opportunities within their social circles
  • Integrate with Facebook Events Calendar
  • Integrations with Facebook Workplace (If possible in the future)

We plan to keep working on it and will launch it soon, in order to gain user feedback.

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