5 Fabulous Feminist Coding Bootcamp Projects

Your technical portfolio is the number one thing that, during your job search, will prove to employers that you’re just as hireable as any other junior developer. That portfolio of coding bootcamp projects is therefore one of the most valuable takeaways you’ll get from your experience—and thus a major focus of our curriculum here at the all-women’s Grace Hopper Program.

Of the three projects students build with us, the capstone or final project is the most ambitious. Students work in teams over the course of two weeks to decide on a project, break out the workload, research any additional technologies they’ll need to make it happen, build, test, iterate, and deploy their app—just as engineers do in the actual workplace.

That team experience gives Grace Hopper Program grads a leg up on the job search, and the diversity of thought in these groups yields incredible results. Moreover, many of our engineers build technology specifically to benefit women—and we are here for it. Here are some of our favorite feminist coding bootcamp projects.

Be-Yoncé

An augmented reality Beyoncé experience

Who doesn’t want to step into Beyoncé’s shoes for a day—seriously, have you seen Homecoming? The Be-Yoncé app is a fun, interactive AR experience that allows you to try on some of the pop star’s most iconic looks and dance around in them. Sounds fun, right? To start, you pick a headpiece, a bodysuit, and a song you want to listen to during your session. Once you’re really feeling yourself, take a screenshot of your final look to share with the world.

Specs:

• Built by adapting TensorFlow.js’s PoseNet for a React-Redux frontend
• Node, Express, PostgreSQL, and Sequelize on the backend
• Outfits dynamically positioned on HTML5 canvas using utility functions that allowed them to move and scale with user’s motions

Team Members: Chelsi Asulin, Alex Grazier, Macarena Carreno, Linda Saraguro

Burst

A news app designed to pop your political bubble

If you feel like your social media feeds are the definition of an echo chamber, you’re probably not wrong. That’s how the algorithms are built. But the three women who built the Burst app aim to change that by empowering readers with unbiased information about what’s going on in the world.

When you log in, you’ll take a quiz and choose both topics you want to read about and sources you prefer. Then, Burst will present an assortment of articles from both aligned with your political preference and not. The hope is that reading news from a variety of sources will help people to understand different perspectives and ultimately open up more respectful conversations.

The app also offers data visualizations and a video chat platform for users to engage with each other.

Built using:

• NERDS stack (Node.js, Express, React/Redux, Sequelize/PostgreSQL)
• News API
• OpenTok
• D3.js
• three.JS
• WebGL
• Bootstrap
• Material-UI

Team Members: Alicia Dinkel, Claire Watson, Sarah Hailey

Fortune Cookie

A socially-conscious dating app

If you’ve ever been stood up for a date, you know how frustrating it can be to feel like you’ve wasted your time and energy with no reward. Fortune Cookie tries to remedy this by penalizing bad behavior (gee, imagine that!). If your date flakes, for example, the app charges them $5, which goes to a pre-selected charity of their choice.

If, on the other hand, a user is disrespectful or acts inappropriately, $5 will be transferred from them to the user they targeted and they’ll be banned from the app. The goal is to promote respectful dating interactions and social responsibility—two things the world needs more of, if you ask us.

Fortune Cookie also offers an AR feature that allows you to view users in your vicinity and add interesting candidates to the top of your queue.

Built using:

• Cloud Firestore on the back end
• React Native, Redux, Three.js on the front end
• Expo AR kit
• Stripe payment processor

Team Members: Abby Benvenutti, Evie Ren, Siri McClean

Power Prose

A communication-monitoring app that helps women speak and write more assertively

Many women regularly employ qualifying phrases like, “That’s just my two cents,” or consistently apologize as a way to make themselves less threatening to men. This practice undermines our authority, yet can be hard to overwrite because it’s so ingrained in most women as to be subconscious and is generally socially acceptable, so isn’t called out as a habit that needs changing (the way cursing might be, for example, in a professional setting).

So Power Prose is here to fill in the gap. The app allows you to catch certain phrases in your writing—called WatchWords—and will even analyze your recorded speech. You can review historical data and charts to see how you’re progressing in terms of WatchWords, and even see how often your tone skews toward tentative instead of confident.

Built using:

• Redux, React, and the Recharts library
• Watson’s Tone Analyzer
• Websockets for speech-to-text-to-processing on long audio recordings and real-time speech analysis

Team Members: Ann Layman, Lyssa Stiller, Jacquelyn Wax, Hannah Weber

Code Witch

An educational coding game where the main character is a girl (gasp!)

Code Witch, a programming game for kids aged 5-13, stole our hearts right from the start by featuring a witch as its main character, in stark contrast to most EdTech products where the main characters are boys. Teaching children JavaScript (or any coding language) can be challenging if the curriculum is boring, which is why so many teachers prefer to gamify tech learning.

The goal in the game world is to navigate Code Witch to her end destination by correctly writing and executing code. Using block and text-based editors, kids come to understand both the abstract concepts of code and how to write specific programs. Normalizing girls in STEM is super important, not just to give girls good role models, but to teach boys that girls can be programmers, too.

Built using:

• Blockly
• Server-side JavaScript evaluation
• Firebase
• React, React-Konva, React Ace, Redux
• Express
• Sandbox

Team Members: Roxie Turner, Neha Choudhary, Shiau-uen Ding, Mimi Zhao

Ready to build empowering projects like these? At the Grace Hopper Program, you can learn what you need to do just that in 17 weeks. Best of all: You don’t pay tuition til you get hired, so there are no upfront tuition costs. Apply today to join us.