PathFinder

Struggling to find a suitable career? We will help you find your calling. SMS today, or checkout our website

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Inspiration

When we were young, we didn't know what to do for a living. At middle age, we still don't We wish we had had impersonal help from a non-judgemental algorithm

What it does

Asks you a few personality questions, matches your personality with people who have jobs (and like it), and tells you what kind of jobs you can apply for. Works through SMS chat using Twilio API

How we built it

With a totally uncoupled architecture. We have three different layers, and 4 parts. The middle layer built using Node.JS, MongoDB, Mongoose choreographs the interactions between all the other parts. The backend layer is made with Python, and uses decision tree algorithm (KDD datastructure) to find the closest matching mentors. The two other layers - Twilio interactor and the web app work with the choreographer to serve customers through SMS and web. Every time someone fills the form, if you are employed, your current job and your job satisfaction level are gathered, and used for updating the model for the next person to use the app.

Challenges we ran into

Quite a few. Didn't sleep a wink :( Some issues are still open, but we plan to get them done and perfect this. To be more specific 1) The architecture is quite complex and to be honest we feel we may have bitten more than we can chew 2) Since we didn't use a cloud hosting, we faced security issues trying to POST and GET from local servers. We have temporarily fixed this using the CORS chrome extension, but this would get resolved if we deploy this app (apps!) in cloud. 3) Our ambitions were high, but we ran into silly, unexpected bugs that drove us crazy and kept us awake. We are scratchy developers. A little less so now.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

1) The architecture 2) Our ambition 3) Getting at least a part of this big idea done

What we learned

A lot. Node.JS, Python, Mongo DB, working with and creating APIs, and to may to not aim very high. Or, maybe not.

What's next for PathFinder

We are too invested in PathFinder to just leave it at this now. There are too many other ideas we would like to implement, and haven't been able to because we are scratchy developers. We need to do a lot of data validation, work on security aspects. And we plan to integrate with ICIMS API to redirect customers to job postings as an added bonus.

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