Building a Web App to Navigate the 2019 GHC Career Fair
TL; DR. If you are coming to the 2019 GHC and need to do your Career Fair company research fast, check out this Web App I made: https://ruolinzheng08.github.io/ghc-2019-company-lookup/.
I’m attending the 2019 Grace Hopper Celebration in two weeks, and I’m especially excited about the Career Fair: I will be looking for internships for Summer 2020 and will be meeting recruiters and engineers from all my dream companies. To get the most out of the Career Fair, I wanted to do lots of company research in advance, and do it as efficiently and effectively as possible.
I decided to make a Web App: It saves me the trouble of copying and pasting company names from the official Exhibitor List PDF; googling the names; browsing their descriptions and websites; finally, referring back to the Exhibitor List PDF to note down their booth numbers. Moreover, publishing the Web App will make it a useful resource both for myself and fellow GHC’ers.
That’s my motivation for building this Web App. Now, jumping straight into the design, I wanted the tool to be as minimalistic and user-friendly as possible. The basic feature the App needed was to display a table of companies’ names, booth numbers, a short description plus a detailed one, and website URL’s. Then, it’d be more useful if users can search for specific companies. Based on these two requirements, I found a great framework called DataTables and started prototyping my idea on CodePen.
The HTML/JavaScript was very straightforward, thanks to DataTables’ useful plug-ins, and I could focus on what supports the App’s core feature: the company data.
Getting the company & booth number data was easy: I simply converted the official Exhibitor List PDF to a CSV file with an online tool and manually fixed some erroneous commas. To get information like company description and website, I needed an API.
I first turned to LinkedIn’s API for its comprehensive database of company data. However, I found the set-up too complicated for this small project and switched to the Google Knowledge Graph API. It only requires adding one’s Google Developer API Key in the HTTP GET request and returns standard JSON data.
I used Python to get data from the API and to parse them, as I’ve used Python extensively for organizing and analyzing data. Once I parsed and cleaned the data, I saved it as a local JSON file and had my script.js load it into the Data Table when the user visits the website. This way, the App remains usable even when offline (fingers-crossed for good WIFI connection at the conference!).
As for final touch-ups, I fixed some missing or wrong entries returned by the API and made the URL cells clickable. I wrote a post on LinkedIn about my Web App and received great feedback from my friends, networks, and fellow GHC’19 attendees. It’s quite amazing to me how this simple initiative can make quite a big impact and help me connect with GHC’ers before the conference.
In all, I’m very excited about attending GHC for my first time and hope that people find this tool helpful in navigating the Career Fair!
The website is at https://ruolinzheng08.github.io/ghc-2019-company-lookup/, and all the code is in my GitHub repository. Please do reach out if you have any thoughts or suggestions. See you in Orlando in two weeks!
