I went to Hackbright demo night last night, here are my notes on companies and the demos themselves

Companies which pitched:

  • Varo (hosting company) https://www.varomoney.com presenter: CEO Colin Walsh
  • Minerva College - accredited, travel-based college, sounds very cool. Teaching-based college, whoda thunk https://www.minerva.kgi.edu/
  • Checkr - background checks with a focus on helping former inmates get accurately represented, stack: ruby python golang, docker, k8. Hiring 30 grads in the next year https://checkr.com/
  • Some mini stock trading company which couldn’t find any womeng to bring, 15 people, half developers. Stack: python, postgres, Django, jupiterhub
  • Kapwing - Game dev / visual content developer platform, 11 ppl 8 eng, hackbright alum. Python, flask, react, node https://www.kapwing.com/
  • Skillz, an esports platform. Breaking 1B revenue soon. Machine learning, make esports smarter, real-time streaming, hiring front/back/data. https://games.skillz.com/
  • Bolt, checkout platform, turnkey checkout and fraud detection, want to help ppl compete against amazon, stack: react, golang. 150 ppl, 30 eng, SF and Toronto https://www.bolt.com/checkout/
  • TCV Venture Capital & Private Equity - presenter: Aaron Ford, 13 billion investment, has 4 eng, sounds like a recruiting platform? Hiring 4 eng this year
  • Amazon Music presented by Dylan, hiring 100 fullstack eng next year, want ppl good at algorithms.
  • http://Coverin.ai (?) head of eng, ai and robotics company, deep reinforcement learning, reach robots complex skills. Jasmine, eng. Stack: python, redis, docker
  • Lambda Labs - makes gpu workstations, hiring a fullstack eng to manage e-commerce and manufacturing execution system. Stack: Django, jQuery, angular. Mentions co-founders girlfriend did a bootcamp and liked it :eyeroll: https://lambdalabs.com/

Bootcamp grad projects:

  • Instagram clone built by Ilene, whose background is in biochemistry and QA. Most challenging feature: autocomplete hashtags using a twitter api(?)
  • DanceDestination written by serial entrepreneur Bajor. It finds dance events by music genre and location. Data sources: Eventbrite and – using beautifulSoup. Greatest challenge: other people’s code/apis
  • Cultivate by Courtney, whose background is in data analysis and yoga. It’s a habit tracker. Gcal integration, d3.js charts, scraped 3 sites for upcoming yoga class data.
  • Marina One Runners by Cynthia, whose background is in sociology and nursing.
  • employee resource app called Hear to help company employees access employee resources- looks like a great start at cloning Callisto. Well presented. Elizabeth http://hearmehearyou.com
  • Ellen, directions app DayMap, Pathfinder between list of destinations, choose transit type, display on custom-colored map.
  • venue booking site Bravo by (my mentee) Eloisa! Her background is in construction and comedy show production. It helps small shows stay alive by finding places for the show to go on! The right venue can make or break a show. Most difficult part: venue ranking algorithm.
  • game-on by Grace, whose background is in music and physiology. It’s a game discovery and rating site. Difficulties: game listing API, image resolution issues. Moving starfield website background.
  • agile methodologies used to develop a soccer networking site by Hadis. Biggest problem: dependency version mismatches.
  • Jessica Gamio, project Treefinder, using machine learning to find trees in SF. Identify tree species by lead shape using a starting data set. Using Clarify API. You can log in and save your own tree records, called “treehugs” such cute, I am ded
  • metaSearch by Caz, tracking individual developer job search process. Uses github jobs api. Uses chart.js and Eventbrite API, recommends events to go to in order to help w job search- networking, tech talks.
  • Kristen Germeroth (my mentee!) PopWatch (popularity watch) to track your hotel’s TripAdvisor popularity and reviews! Very nice. No API token, so scrape via cronjob. Download csv option for Excel lovers! Comp(arison) sets very cool.
  • Loreen Zhang presents San Francisco Decades. Shows restaurants by decade- giving recognition to older businesses.
  • Workout My Workout by Marissa. For organizing running workouts.
  • BadFoodU built by Marissa(?) Sandman to crowdsource potential sources of food poisoning. Very cute graphics- she made them herself! “Not all problems come with error messages!” She printed custom shirt and stickers, zomg.
  • Mapmosphere by Rosetta from New Zealand. Inspired by Snapchat maps (I really like snap maps xD) using mapbox API. Also implemented Instagram search images by location (after Instagram removed that favorite feature) Site is live as will have an ssl cert soon
  • Tyler from Hawaii presents an app for reviewing screenplays- like Google docs but better, with crosslinked comments and multi-contributor statistics. Using nfa instead of regex. Security per doc as a feature. Working on server-side doc encryption
  • Zoe Henderson presents GlassBeads, encouraging high quality conversations via an online citation system to help navigate conversation content. Unit&integration tests. React.js Authentication and session management from scratch, following owasp guidelines