Celebrate with our 2021 H2 cohort!
Techtonica’s 2021 H2 cohort of software engineers have completed their final projects and will soon interview with our partner companies and graduate! Read about the participants and their unique final projects below and join us to celebrate their successes and what’s next for them at virtual graduation on December 22nd!
Elizabeth (she/her/ö)
Bio: As a lifelong learner, Elizabeth began pursuing a degree in law with a triple major in computer science, mathematics, and history at UC Berkeley. Her college aspirations were soon short-circuited by an early career in technology where as a self-taught technical person, she had the privilege of working with tech pioneers on ground-breaking projects for Intel, Seagate, S3, Symantec, and Charles Schwab. Elizabeth then engineered an integrated system for a mini-restaurant chain that set a trend for the restaurant industry, streamlining all of the customer touchpoints through technology. Seeing the pandemic as an opportunity to advance her skills, Elizabeth feels privileged to have had the opportunity to codify her technical experience to become a full-stack engineer via Techtonica. DaySlayer™ is the culmination of that experience and Elizabeth looks forward to mentoring future participants, imparting her unique experience onto them and helping them improve their lives through technology.
Project name: DaySlayer
Project description: A low-maintenance app which provides tools and guides to assist team leaders to effectively lead their team.
Hardest part of building your project: Surprisingly, the Google Calendar API was the most difficult part to incorporate, as the heavily secured Google API is layered with so much security that I had to dive very deeply into the layers of the code in order to get it to work.
Favorite part of building your project: The best part was seeing all of the components working together seamlessly and delivering the results that I had originally envisioned.
Jen (she/her)
Bio: Before joining Techtonica, Jen was a preschool teacher who worked with a team of teachers and taught over a dozen students. During the pandemic, she used her web development skills to help update and maintain the school’s website to keep parents and students informed with daily changes. This led her to discover her desire to learn more about code again. She is passionate about building accessible websites and applications that will allow for global collaboration of storytelling and make tasks easier to complete. Jen hopes to bridge her passion of teaching and bring more knowledge and diversity into the tech industry by mentoring learners of low-income backgrounds in coding languages such as JavaScript.
Project name: Mindful Bites
Project description: Mindful Bites is a web app designed to improve mental health — increasing self-awareness and building skills to manage stress as users can keep track of their moods and get guided meditations based on how they are feeling.
Hardest part of building your project: Dynamically matching a user’s mood to a randomized meditation video that matches the same mood from the backend to the frontend.
Favorite part of building your project: Designing the mockup, planning out the user flow, and bringing the mockups into fruition were some of her favorite parts in building the project. This app was both a personal and passion project for Jen. Her goal with Mindful Bites is to create a tool that can help herself and others to understand themselves better. It is a reminder to check in with ourselves and find ways to document our emotions, understand our triggers, and find healthy ways to cope with them.
Jen was placed at Sony PlayStation.
Malika (she/her)
Bio: Before switching careers to software development, Malika worked as a project engineer for major capital oil and gas projects in Kazakhstan. After moving from Kazakhstan to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2020, she discovered her interest in the world of tech and tried coding for the first time. That led her to Techtonica, where she learned how to create full-stack applications. Malika is very excited about her new career because the tech industry is constantly evolving and she would love to evolve with it. She is passionate about coding and would love to give back to the tech community by mentoring people who are looking for a career change.
Project name: Pomni
Project description: A Russian word for “remember,” Pomni is an app to learn new words using flashcards where users can create, read, edit, delete flashcards, and use an external dictionary for searching word definitions!
APIs used: Auth0, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary
Hardest part of building your project: The trickiest part was reusing components, where buttons would do slightly different actions for each route. With the help of my mentor, I learned how a wrapper function can resolve the problem.
Favorite part of building your project: Learning new things while coding and debugging and seeing my small twin version of the famous Quizlet app coming together. I plan on developing, adding new features and making my app unique as I gain more knowledge and experience.
Natalie (she/her)
Bio: Natalie is a Latinx web developer and technology enthusiast based in Mountain View, California. Natalie’s varied interests guided her through college to the Redwood Coast, Nepal, and eventually the San Francisco Bay Area. She discovered that coding made her excited to learn and grow in new ways she never previously imagined. Now, she is irrevocably fascinated by the power of computer science and passionate about building amazing projects with incredible people. Natalie is excited to continue to grow as a developer and start her career in tech.
Project name: Explore Our World
Project description: Explore Our World is a web app designed to inspire curiosity and invoke wonder about our world’s cultural and natural heritage through a digital photo journey of UNESCO world heritage sites.
APIs used: Flickr
Hardest part of building your project: The hardest part of building my project was figuring out how to preprocess, filter, and populate my database with UNESCO data. I then used that data to retrieve Flickr images.
Favorite part of building your project: My favorite part of building my project was the sense of satisfaction I received for all the little problem solving accomplishments . . . until it became a fully functional application.
Sarah (she/her)
Bio: Sarah is a first-generation Latinx developer who fell in love with coding during the pandemic. She has worked in education for the past decade, teaching hundreds of young minds about everything from social sciences to STEM. While Sarah did enjoy teaching, she is excited about starting a career in tech because, as a Boricua and a member of multiple marginalized groups, she can’t wait to help create a community actively bolstering representation for underrepresented groups in tech. In addition to the essential skills Sarah brings with her from working in education around interpersonal connection, research (data collection), and empathy, Sarah brings a passion about code, and a rare persistence and drive. She is excited to be making the transition into an industry where she believes she can have a positive impact.
Project name: A Decade of Pantone
Project description: A Decade of Pantone is a social media app that allows users to reflect on how Pantone’s Color of the Year has influenced fashion and design both in society at large, and in their own lives and closets.
APIs used: Colormind.io
Hardest part of building your project: Navigating documentation while considering APIs for the project.
Favorite part of building your project: Getting to engage with the subject matter on a deeper level and creating something aesthetically interesting and beautiful.
Serena (she/her)
Bio: Serena graduated during the pandemic with a biology degree and a data science minor. Her first introduction to coding was through a data science class where she learned Python. Realizing that she enjoyed coding over memorizing biology terms, she sought opportunities that exposed her to the tech industry. She learned that tech can create a positive impact on our society and wanted to be a part of that impact. Her passion for helping others and love for creativity and problem-solving propelled her to become a software engineer and start her career in tech. Serena hopes to combine her backgrounds in biology, data science, and web development to write code and create software that will impact the lives of others.
Project name: B Star Website
Project description: B Star is Serena’s favorite restaurant in San Francisco. B Star Website is a ✨ revamped ✨ version of the old B Star website with improved UI and a new weather forecast feature. By improving the UI and adding new features, this will allow for easy-to-read menus and a smoother outdoor dining experience.
APIs used: Open Weather, Maps Embed API
Hardest part of building your project: Designing the database to store menu items and creating a filter function for customers with dietary restrictions.
Favorite part of building your project: I really enjoyed the whole process from start to beginning. I loved being able to see my designs and ideas come to life. I also enjoyed getting code review comments on how I can improve my code and learning new frameworks and best practices.
Shaylan (she/her)
Bio: Shaylan is an African American woman born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. She’s been surrounded by tech companies most of her life but unsure of how to break into programming. After working at Convoy and developing some SQL skills, she upped her experience by taking a few online courses. After confirming this was the right path for her by speaking with other non-traditional pathway software engineers, the stars aligned and she found Techtonica through a Seattle Women’s Tech Facebook page. Her hope is to satisfy her constant itch for learning new things and help increase diverse representation in the industry.
Project name: Donation Freight Network
Project description: An application that connects semi-truck drivers who have rejected product with nearby donation facilities.
APIs used: Google Maps Distance Matrix API
Hardest part of building your project: The hardest part of building my project was implementing the layout and CSS to match what I had planned. This was the first project we took a week to plan for, therefore I had an outline of how I wanted my page to function and most importantly render. CSS has been difficult for me in the past therefore I took a step back to re-educate myself on CSS and Bootstrap basics. I also spent a lot of time troubleshooting and using the inspect tool to handle the stubbornness that comes along with designing one’s application. Overall, I strengthened my CSS skills and learned when to reprioritize original plans.
Favorite part of building your project: My favorite part of the project was learning about different tools. Instead of using the Google Maps API for rendering the map on my application, I learned that there was a package called “react-google-maps.” It provides a set of React components wrapping the underlying Google Maps JavaScript API v3 instances, making my life a bit easier! The world of technology is endless and findings like these prove just that.
Tabitha (she/her)
Bio: Tabitha is a geeky single mom of five living in Berkeley, California. It was the encouragement of her board gaming group that led her to give programming a go and to take the plunge to go back to school. She fell in love with bash scripting and, 18 months later, is ready to start her career as a full-stack developer. She’s particularly interested in backend roles within a strong growth-mindset company culture.
Project name: GameNight
Project description: An app for board game enthusiasts who attend in-person gaming meetups.
APIs used: Board Game Atlas, Auth0
Hardest part of building your project: The greatest challenge of this project was striving to deliver my best work under a deadline while continuing my training and meeting goals with Techtonica as I prepare for my placement.
Favorite part of building your project: Learning! I learn best by doing. I am emerging from this project stronger in every way.
Tara (she/her)
Bio: Prior to her time at Techtonica, Tara was a middle school teacher who taught multiple subjects including STEM classes. She discovered software engineering when she was asked to teach an “Intro to Computers” class. She holds Bachelor of Science degrees in Parks and Natural Resources and Information Technology. She is drawn to software engineering because it requires continual learning and collaboration, and there are many opportunities to give back to society. She is excited to pay it forward by advocating for diversity in tech and mentoring others who want to learn how to code.
Project name: Wildfire Commander
Project description: Wildfire Commander is a much needed fire information dashboard for incident commanders managing a wildfire.
APIs used: Open Weather Google React Maps
Hardest part of building your project: Deploying to Heroku and debugging errors.
Favorite part of building your project: Working with my patient mentors and making a map of fire perimeter polygons with the Google React Maps API.
Xiao (she/her)
Bio: Xiao is a Finance PhD-turned software engineer excited about incorporating her business acumen in building efficient and scalable algorithms. While learning and using Python for her PhD papers’ data analyses, she continually found herself gravitating towards the coding part of writing papers and enjoying thinking through the logic behind code. With her revived zeal for intellectual challenge and transferable skills acquired during the rigorous PhD training, Xiao is making a career transition into tech with the hope of making a more direct and tangible impact through building products that many users interact with. As a first-generation immigrant and a former financial planner working in another male-dominated industry, Xiao is more thrilled than ever to begin a new chapter of her life in the tech industry and as a voice for those who don’t have one.
Project name: Inve$tory
Project description: Inve$tory is an educational app for learning about stock market investing where users can: 1) view a list of daily top gainers and active stocks; 2) create a watchlist of stocks that allows for individual stock chart view; 3) create customized portfolios and back-test investment strategies (showing holding-period return and portfolio performance chart) in the specified time frame.
APIs used: IEX Cloud financial data API, Auth0
Hardest part of building your project: Being comfortable with the iterative and constant process of prioritizing tasks at hand and refining various parts of the project for better performance/efficiency. I learned so much from dealing with challenges such as having to make a shift in my MVP, diligently refactoring my code for efficiency and readability, and constantly making executive decisions about libraries and frameworks to use.
Favorite part of building your project: I thoroughly enjoyed every moment of building this passion project because I learned so much. I picked up many new technologies (form library, charting tool, etc.) that I believe will benefit my app-building process in the long run.
Zelma (she/her)
Bio: Zelma is a first-generation Latinx Mississippian who fell in love with coding during the pandemic. She fondly called Oslo, Norway home for the better part of the last decade, and recently returned to the U.S. to pursue her dream of becoming a software engineer. (Og ja, hun kan snakke litt norsk og svensk, men ikke dansk.) With the yearning to grow and help others, Zelma is excited about her future as a software engineer. She hopes to pay it forward any way she can, and give back to society through her work. She would also like to inspire more women and people of color to join the tech industry, because she believes the more diverse the industry is, the more innovative and useful the products we create will be.
Project name: InterMention
Project description: InterMention uses cognitive restructuring to help users change the way they think; users can enter custom affirmations that are sent to their phone to counteract negative thoughts.
APIs used: Auth0, Twilio SMS, They Said So Quotes
Hardest part of building your project: Implementing the SMS feature to send users their default affirmation/mention. This turned out to be a lot more complicated than originally planned, but I’m so glad I finished my MVP and was able to include it.
Favorite part of building your project: Knowing that I finally got to use my psychology degree. It’s been a long time coming, but all those lectures on cognitive behavioral therapy finally paid off! If my project can help one person feel better then I’d consider it a success.
Zelma was placed at Sony PlayStation.
Techtonica relies on donations, volunteering, and hiring partnerships to provide our services to our participants. We welcome your individual donations, volunteering, as well as you involving your company as a sponsor. Thank you so much for your support!
