Inspiration A résumé doesn’t always capture what someone can do. Volunteering, community projects, and helping others develop valuable skills, but that experience can be hard to explain to an employer. We created Proofly to explore how people could turn those experiences into evidence of their skills.
What it does Proofly is a prototype for documenting project experience and connecting it to job-relevant skills. In the demo, a community member writes a vouch, a simulated coordinator reviews it, and Proofly creates a tamper-evident credential. An employer can paste a job description into the Employer Lens to see relevant skills, supporting quotes, and gaps where the demo has no evidence.
The prototype also includes Auth0 account sign-in, a Stripe Identity test-mode integration, and a public Badgr badge-record lookup. The Badgr lookup does not yet verify badge ownership or issuer trust.
How we built it We built Proofly with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, using Node.js and Express for the server. We used the browser’s Web Crypto API to sign demo credentials with Ed25519 and IndexedDB to store them locally. SQLite supports the prototype’s account-verification records. We used GitHub for collaboration and prepared the app for deployment on Hostinger.
Challenges and what we learned Our biggest challenge was designing for trust without overstating what a prototype can prove. A digital signature can reveal tampering, but it does not prove that a testimonial is truthful or that an organization approved it. We also learned that identity verification, duplicate-account prevention, and verifying an organization’s authority are separate problems.
Deploying an Express app introduced another challenge: Hostinger loads the entry file differently from our local setup. We separated app creation from startup and added a test for the hosting-style import.
What’s next We want to build authenticated organization review, contact verification, stronger duplicate-account controls, server-side credential issuance, and more complete badge verification. We also want to test the experience with community partners and job seekers.
Prototype limitations: The example people, projects, and vouches are fictional. Credential approval is simulated, and Stripe test-mode results do not verify real identities. Proofly is not yet a production credential-verification service.
Built With
- api
- auth0
- badgr
- crypto
- css3
- ed25519
- express.js
- github
- html5
- identity
- indexeddb
- javascript
- node.js
- sqlite
- stripe
- web
