ViewMe

Just getting settled in
Late night coding
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Inspiration

I am currently searching for jobs and internships, and wanted more insight into what I can do to improve my resume or prepare for interviews that weren't from career centers. So, I decided to use Google's Gemini API to have an interview preparation website. Even while I was creating ViewMe this weekend, my friends asked me to send them the link once it's finished; so that definitely motivated me to complete it!

What it does

ViewMe takes in a resume file (either pdf or text) and a targeted job, and replies with advice as to how to improve your resume to be a more ideal candidate for the job. Then, it gives you a list of potential interview questions where you could choose to reload new questions or start answering. If you start answering, there is a suggested 90 second timer to answer the prompt. Once you've submitted your question, you are then given feedback on your response and asked if you want to retry the question or move onto the next; and at the end it gives an overview and gives you the option to start again.

How I built it

I started learning last week a little about AI and APIs, I was originally going to build it with the OpenAI API but decided to try and learn more Gemini. My university introduced us to programming in python, so I am fairly familiar with it. I started with the app.py to incorporate the API, and was able to run it locally in my terminal in VSCode. Eventually, I incorporated HTML with JavaScript and CSS, and was able to run a virtual environment to host it through my IP. Finally, I used render to load my code stored in my github repository to the internet.

Challenges I ran into

Every transition had it's fair share of debugging (terminal to IP hosting to Website), but the new libraries I learned of in python were helpful. Getting the website to work was a little more challenging, as I figured out I could make it run from gunicorn rather than calling "python app.py" in my terminal. I had a rudimentary understanding of Artificial Intelligence, so whenever I would need help, I'd prompt an AI bot to be my Software Engineering Advisor and teach me what new code would work. Sometimes these bots would get debugging wrong, but that only helped me learn more about prompt based responses.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Making my first live website, I've always wanted to create one since I started coding. I also am proud that I'm able to complete a hackathon, and that it serves a purpose that could help those in my same field or people in general. I am also amazed by the amount of software/technology I implemented that I never touched before.

What I learned

I learned more about GeminiAI, I had barely used OpenAI, but it was fun to learn a new AI API especially since I knew basically nothing outside of student presentations about AI and was able to make a fully functioning project. I didn't know python had a PdfReader library, so I learned more about the uses of that and Flask when it came to file reading and storage in python and backend development. I also learned more about website hosting, as this is my first website. I also learned about other python libraries like how gunicorn is used to translate python web applications to html web servers.

What's next for ViewMe

Definitely a custom domain name. It would be nice to either add on to this project or incorporate it to a larger one. I might see if I could get it to run faster (outside of paying for a web service) or make the code more efficient in general. Overall I'm very proud of this project, and if it could help just one other person then it would all be worth it. As for me, I'm going to take a long nap after the rest of my Sunday obligations.