Techtonica’s second cohort of 2019 is ready for graduation!
After five months of full-time learning at Techtonica, our participants, who are all Bay Area women and non-binary adults with low incomes, are ready to graduate and be matched with our hiring partners! Each participant has a unique story and has built a full-stack JavaScript app, and all share a genuine passion to #BridgeTheTechGap. Join us for graduation on Wednesday, December 11th at Indeed’s office in San Francisco and read on to be inspired!
Alicia (she/her)
Bio: Alicia has spent most of her life traveling with the United States Air Force as a Raven Military Police Officer. After 10 years in the military, she joined CalFire and spent 4 years as a Wildland Firefighter. After a life of action, she wanted to move into tech but was unable to do it right away as her family grew. When she applied to Techtonica, she knew this was the right time for her to pursue her dream to make a difference and be creative at the same time.
Project name: MakeYourSchool
Project description: MakeYourSchool is a web app that gathers feedback from students to make their high school a better place to learn.
APIs used: Google OAuth API, Stripe API, Twilio SendGrid API
Hardest part of building your project: Adding the OAuth (Google API), Figuring out why the Google API would only let me run my backend server and not my front.
Favorite part of building your project: Building the backend and setting up the server #BackendSquad #MongoDBAtlas
Jennifer (she/her)
Bio: When Jennifer took a gap year from college, she found herself working in tech for a hyper-growth startup. While there, she was amazed at the impact the engineers had at their fingertips, but above all, their happiness in their careers. Without a second thought, she embarked on a journey of self-development and impact by teaching herself how to program, and it has been her greatest adventure yet.
Project name: doggydate
Project description: doggydate is a MongoDB, Express.js, React.js, and Node application where soon-to-be doggy parents can browse dogs for adoption.
APIs used:
- PetFinder (Key Granted)
- Auth0 (Key Granted)
Hardest part of building your project: I set the bar high for myself by insisting on learning the latest release of React and using Auth0. Although it was an expensive investment, it proved to be valuable. My authentication service documentation was written for the latest version of React, and it helped me reiterate what I learned. I went from not really understanding React or authentication to implementing it in my application.
Favorite part of building your project: Building something I am passionate about and seeing it through, from start to end, is humbling, rewarding, and a wonderful learning experience.
Jennifer was placed at Grove Collaborative, where she still works as a CX/Frontend engineer.
Juliana (she/her)
Bio: Juliana is from Brazil, and she moved to the US 8 years ago. She had her first experience in tech through contractor positions related to her native language (translation, localization QA, content reviewing). She had the opportunity to take some coding classes and that sparked her desire to learn more about coding. After researching software engineering bootcamps, she found Techtonica though the Latinas in Tech Facebook group, and here she is!
Project name: Curb-Alert
Project description: Curb-Alert is an app to find free stuff on curbs around you (or post free stuff). You look through posts of different things, see if something interests you, click for the address, and go pick it up. You can also look at a map and find free stuff near you. After you’ve picked up your items, click on “claimed” to delete them from the database. If you have stuff to donate, then you can post a picture, put stuff on the curb, and see magic happen! If you find stuff on the curb that you think is useable, take a picture, post it, and feel good about yourself!
APIs used: GoogleMaps API, AuthO, HTML Geolocation
Hardest part of building your project: So far it’s been learning how to use GoogleMaps API
Favorite part of building your project: Building my backend/database
Juliana was placed at Remix, where she does back-end work in Ruby on Rails.
Katie (she/her)
Bio: Katie was born and raised in San Francisco, CA, and is the youngest in her family. She grew up trying to copy her big sister, who is an avid gamer. Unfortunately, Katie was never a good gamer. Instead, she became interested in the storytelling aspect of console games, character modeling, rigging, and the overall game development process. She aspires to be a game developer, and make games that gamers that her sister will want to play.
Project name: I-AM
Project description: I-AM is a serverless chatbot app that lets users talk about any subject, then detects and tracks the user’s emotions regarding that subject throughout time.
APIs used:
1. Amazon Comprehend
2. Amazon Lex
3. Amazon Amplify
Hardest part of building your project (so far): The hardest parts were:
1. Hooking up my Lex bot to the front end
2. Integrating comprehend and dynamo to my lambda function
3. Retrieving Cognito authentication info, and making it accessible to all components
Favorite part of building your project: My favorite parts were:
1. Creating the background for my app via Blender
2. Building my Lex bot was really fun. I had a great time building/testing it.
Katie was placed at Pure Storage.
Lilia (she/her)
Bio: Lilia is from southern California, went to college to learn Russian, and came to San Francisco post-grad. After a stint in sales, Lilia found Techtonica, a tech organization that aligned with her values and finally allowed her to delve into programming. She’s excited to hone her engineering skills and integrate her love of art into her app.
Project name: Lost in the World
Project description: Lost in the World is an app that allows people to discover public art in San Francisco from the Public Art fund and save those results for future use.
APIs used: https://dev.socrata.com/foundry/data.sfgov.org/cf6e-9e4j
Hardest part of building your project: Using React and integrating Auth0 to carry through a user’s whole session.
Favorite part of building your project: Finding out the wonderful data the city of San Francisco has on its public spaces.
Lilia was placed at Indeed, where she worked on emails on the Job Alerts team using Java and Freemarker.
Lo (they/them)
Bio: Fourth-generation Northern Californian and Bay Area local, Lo loves to create and collaborate on products that provide personal support and meaning. Coming from a creative writing and higher education background, their experience in synthesizing complex ideas and expressing them to diverse audiences has led to an interest in backend software engineering and curiosity about all software architecture. Their project is a reflection of their interest in site reliability and chaos engineering: they built a “serverless” realtime app for their final project with a GraphQL API in the hopes that the app would be as fun to “break” as it was to “make.” Lo hopes to move into engineering positions that demand complex problem-solving and negotiating levels of abstraction across different systems, preferably mastering a diverse tech stack along the way. In their spare time, they’re either building small indie projects or working on building CMS and CRM solutions for local nonprofits. They hope to make mentoring other women and nonbinary people from underrepresented backgrounds in technology a key part of their career.
Project name: Grimoire app // Grimoire repo // Development landing page
Project description: A social media experience centered around mindfulness and self-expression, Grimoire’s first feature will be the ability for users to create and discover others’ “oracle decks”: special images that a user can upload, edit, caption, and arrange in a virtual deck to consult for inspiration and self-reflection.
APIs used: Imgix, Firebase, Hasura
Hardest part of building your project: Getting different cloud server services to work together constructively.
Favorite part of building your project: Getting to build a project that expresses my creativity that has also presented me with compelling technical challenges.
Lo was placed at Indeed, where they worked with Java and TypeScript.
Mega (she/her)
Bio: Mega was born and raised in Indonesia. She worked in a variety of non-technical roles and discovered her love of debugging early on. Seeking a computer science education, she relocated to the Bay Area.
Project name: txtrans
Project description: txtrans is a responsive web app that lets users upload text files, choose source and target languages, and download a translated version of the files.
APIs used: Microsoft Translator
Hardest part of building your project: Getting the intended reaction from React.
Favorite part of building your project: Seeing the project come together component by component.
Naomi (she/her)
Bio: Right before starting at Techtonica, Naomi was teaching at an adult school, looking for ways to get into tech. She enjoyed helping others and solving problems, and found that she was as patient solving technical problems as she was dealing with people — if not more so. At Techtonica, her curiosity has led her down many interesting “rabbit holes,” and her perseverance, along with a little help from her fellow cohort members, her mentor, and volunteers, have led her back out.
She thought of the first feature of her final project when she was trying to translate an abstract concept that her ESL literacy students couldn’t understand, tapping her phone multiple times in a translation app to switch between five different languages. The second feature occurred to her when the school closed due to poor air quality from wildfire smoke and she spent over two hours translating and texting messages to students not to come to class.
Project name: Just Say In
Project description: Just Say In is a translation and messaging app. A user can choose as many target languages as there are in the list of available languages and all the translations will be immediately displayed. Upon logging in, the user will also be able to add contacts to send messages that will first be translated into the recipients’ target languages.
APIs used: Google Translate and other translation APIs, Twilio
Hardest part of building your project: Figuring out what it should do, and how
Favorite part of building your project: Connecting all of the parts
Nathália (she/her)
Bio: Nathália has an entrepreneur background, having worked in startups and previously owning her own business in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Living in the Bay Area has shown her that being a software engineer is an exciting way for her to continue using her problem-solving skills. Her diverse background has shown her that technology is the way for businesses to drive productivity and efficiency, and she would like to be part of that driving force.
Project name: Work Buddies
Project description: Work Buddies is a web application that allows registered users to search for individuals or teams. Upon completing a search you will get the basic work information for a searched individual and team, including their geographic work location. Work Buddies addresses the following issues a company faces:
- Easily retrieve contact and geographical information about an individual and team
- Find who is working on a specific team
- Find the best time to schedule a meeting with an individual
APIs used:
- Google Maps API
- Time Zone API
- OAuth Google API
- Google Geocoder API
Hardest part of building your project: Showing the geolocation for teams or individuals and creating the database API has been challenging.
Favorite part of building your project: I have enjoyed working with SQL and the database the most so far.
Nathália was placed at Cisco Meraki.
Nia (she/her)
Bio: Nia got her start in programming working with the computational biology team at Bio-Rad Laboratories. Since then she’s worked in various tech-centered roles in the hopes of polishing her programming skills.
Project name: FloraPRO
Project description: FloraPRO is a gut flora testing application that allows users to buy testing kits, receive mock data about their gut microbiome, and have those results displayed on an explorer page.
APIs used: I’ll be working with US MicroBiome data set. https://github.com/biocore/American-Gut
Hardest part of building your project: Working with a large dataset has been the most difficult part.
Favorite part of building your project: Seeing an idea that I had a while ago come to life.
Noi (she/her)
Bio: Noi was born and raised in Thailand. She started her journey in web programming with HTML and CSS. She gained more interest in JavaScript during the Techtonica program and was excited about the opportunity to build a full-stack web application of her choice using full-stack JavaScript.
Project name: Money Pal
Project description: MoneyPal calculates and breaks down personal incomes and expenses into a daily budget.
APIs used: Food 2Fork
Database: PostgresQL
Front-end: React
Back-end: Node and Express.js
Deployment: Maybe AWS
Hardest part of building your project: Building the database and deploying
Favorite part of building your project: Building UI using CSS-Grid
Noi was placed at Rally Health.
Regina (she/her)
Bio: A San Francisco native, Regina found her interest in programming at a young age using HTML and CSS on Neopets and Myspace to customize her profile pages. Prior to Techtonica, she worked in digital marketing, honing her skills with data and client management. When she is not glued to the computer, strengthening her knowledge in coding, or working on her final project, she spends time illustrating in her sketchbooks.
Project name: What’s In My Fridge
Project description: What’s In My Fridge is an application that allows users to save money by using their fridge ingredients to find delicious recipes and prevent food waste!
APIs used: Auth0, Recipe API, Ingredient list API (maybe)
Hardest part of building your project: Making sure my database is set up properly.
Favorite part of building your project: Being able to put all the skills I have been practicing for the last few months to transform my ideas into reality.
Regina was placed at Indeed, where she did frontend development in JavaScript and TypeScript on the Design Systems team.
Yasmine (she/her)
Bio: Yasmine is a San Francisco native who has gone from reporting on water crises for local newspapers to translating for human rights organizations. While setting up a website for a small business, she discovered her love for web development. Her goal is to create an app that delivers timely, accurate information to medical practitioners.
Project name: HealthTrac
Project description: HealthTrac allows users of FitBit to send vitals from their computer to their doctors.
APIs used: FitBit
Hardest part of building your project: The hardest part of the project is storing and dealing with sensitive information, and trying to figure out the best way to store that information.
Favorite part of building your project: My favorite part of building the project is all of the roadblocks. I’ve had to learn a lot in a short amount of time, and while I may not be able to incorporate everything I’ve delved into in the short timeframe we have, I am excited to continue to develop those skills as I continue my software engineering journey.
Yasmine was placed at Rally Health.
Do you also believe that the first tech job is vital? To set Techtonica participants on the pathway to success, advocate for your company to become a hiring partner or make a donation today.
