Work In Progress

A web app presenting challenges based around the job hunting process and career goals. As job seekers complete these challenges, prizes are unlocked to be used at their favorite stores or restaurants.

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Inspiration

Being affected by the 2023 tech layoffs, we wanted to turn our situation into an opportunity for growth and innovation. By creating a project that would keep us motivated though the job search process, we could also expand it as a solution to help other people in similar situations.

What it does

Users complete challenges in order to unlock and redeem prizes. Currently there are two different types of challenge submissions, one is a file upload and the other is a URL submission. The app checks if the challenge submissions are valid, and if they are the corresponding prizes are unlocked. Users are also able to create an account and login. By logging in, a session token is created for the user which helps track which challenges have been completed.

How we built it

React

React was used for our front-end framework due to its efficiency and flexibility, especially for a small project. And the amount of documentation support for React was extremely helpful in our development process.

Bootstrap

We were initially torn between TailwindCSS and Bootstrap for the CSS framework, but went with Bootstrap due to finding more documentation and support.

Spring Boot (Java)

The team has a lot of experience with Spring Boot and Java, making it the obvious choice for the backend framework.

mysql and SQL

Due to the nature of the data which relates/depends on each other, sql was the right way to go.

Challenges we ran into

I had a lot of ideas I wanted to implement in the project, thinking a month was plenty of time to get it all done. But learning to be realistic and let things go was the biggest challenge for me. Regardless, I’m still very happy with what the team was able to accomplish. - Kira
Learning while working on a project is difficult, but that’s also the best way to learn. If I had a more solid understanding of React, maybe we would have been able to implement more features. - Erynn
Learning how to do auth was a struggle but by having a deadline and a team that needs it done, it motivated me to learn and implement it. - Jason

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Designing the logo. -Kira
Establishing connection with the frontend and backend. - Erynn
Jwt token - Jason

What we learned

I learned React and Bootstrap. - Kira
Learned React, specifically how to make API calls using fetch. - Erynn
Learned jwt and database design - Jason

What's next for Work In Progress

In the future, we would like to make the web app more responsive and develop a mobile app version. We would also deploy this project on cloud services, add more testing, fully validate submitted links, and allow submission of any file type for resumes.

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