Working in a global digital consultancy, our colleagues thrive on our challenging, fast-paced projects. And over the past twelve weeks, the students in Perficient’s Bright Paths program surely know a thing or two about fast-paced project execution! Within mere weeks, 22 women are in the final stages of completing a Perficient-sponsored coding bootcamp in Detroit; their final project includes designing their own apps, all of which serve the world in various ways and all certain to make an impact.
Perficient Bright Paths is a program designed to advance STEM education and career opportunities for underrepresented constituencies and communities. Learn More About Perficient’s Bright Paths
Bright Paths Students Set the Stage for Group Support and Empowerment
The talent and skill demonstrated by these women is one thing, taught through the bootcamp by the skilled team at Hackbright Academy and the Perficient Bright Paths squad of colleagues. The support and comradery they shared with each other are another. As each student presented, the chat was full of encouraging comments and questions and the genuine interest and passion among these ladies were easy to see.
Within Perficient, our culture is known as being “helpful, supportive, and friendly” (Best Places to Work survey, 2021), and these students exhibited the type of encouragement and celebration that motivate and inspire the amazing work we do at Perficient, and, in this case, beyond.
BONUS: Perficient’s Women in Tech ERG Shares Career Growth Experiences with Bright Paths Students
Perficient Proudly Presents the Bright Paths Student Demos
With so many amazing examples of ingenuity, we are breaking our Bright Paths student profiles into two posts. To view all the presentations in full, please enjoy the full playlist.
Celeste Rowe’s Bright Paths Project: Grow Better
Celeste is an ICU RN of five years, who recently found out that she’s in love with computer programming. After facing burnout from working twelve-hour shifts on the floors during these trying times, she finally decided to make a career change. Being a lifelong learner, jumping into a completely new field was actually enticing for Celeste. She’s driven by the desire to add new skills to her toolbelt and often finding herself in the role of cheerleader or mentor for her teammates; she doesn’t take empowering others lightly. Celeste is well-versed in working efficiently in teams of all kinds. Programming allows her to continue using that curiosity and solution-oriented mindset every day. Celeste took a computer class in middle school where she learned HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. She taught herself Python in order to pass Bright Paths technical interview for admissions and will be graduating from Bright Paths in June 2021.
Bright Paths Project: Grow Better
“See where you’ve been to see how you grow.”
Grow Better is a web app where users can log data and photos to document every step of their plant’s growth. The user can learn from past mistakes or mishaps and has the opportunity to watch their plant grow in real-time with photo documentation. Users can learn from trial and error with the logs to reference in the future, as needed.
Technology Stack: Python, Flask, HTML, CSS, SQLAlchemy, Jinja2, PostgreSQL | APIs Used: Cloudinary Media Optimizer
More About Celeste Rowe’s Bright Paths Project: Grow Better
Christina Babaya’s Bright Paths Project: Comparing Cosmetic Products by Ingredients
Christina Babaya is based in Elk River, MN, and is of Cameroonian origin, having lived and gone to school in Cameroon for two years. Growing up, her family was very active with soccer, which she played for six years in addition to eight years of competitive dance before pursuing track and field in high school, where she also took AP Computer Science her senior year. In her first semester at Southwest Minnesota State University, she majored in Computer Science and learned quite a lot about terminals, using Jedit, and also learned about gates and machine languages operating off binary numbers. Christina is always finding new ways of using her creativity to inspire others.
Bright Paths Project: Comparing Cosmetic Products by Ingredients
This user-based web app allows users to predict which products may be a good fit for their skin by creating a Flask app that allows users to view information on products and ingredients.
Technology Stack: Flask, SQLAlchemy, Bootstrap, ForeignKeys, Jinja | APIs Used: Used data from “California regulations of possibly harmful products”, which was a CSV file
More About Christina Babaya’s Bright Paths Project: Comparing Cosmetic Products by Ingredients
(Editor’s Note: This post will be updated when Christina’s video is available)
Deepti Dhar’s Bright Paths Project: Welcome to Stock Market
Deepti graduated with a Bachelor’s degree and diploma in Business Administration with a specialization in Marketing and worked as a Relationship Banker and as a Marketing Coordinator for the banking industry. While she completed the prep course in Python coding from Bright Paths, she was never exposed to computers apart from emails. She was inspired to try her hand at it and improve. While it was a challenge for her to learn about computers and applications from a developer perspective, her app earned rave reviews from Bright Paths students, Perficient colleagues, and Hackbright leadership.
Bright Paths Project: Welcome to Stock Market
Login and registration buttons welcome users to the home screen. Deepti used the J-Query library to display when the user clicks the button. After creating an account, the user can log in to the app. CSS and Bootstrap were used to make it visually pretty and she seeded her Postgres database with stock information from the Alpha Advantage API. She created some fake users for development using the Faker python library. On the stocks page, the user can view a list of all stocks. To display this information, she queried her database using SQLAlchemy and rendered the results using Jinja templating and HTML.
Technology Stack: SQL Alchemy, Python, Jinja, Postgres database, J-Query, Javascript, Faker python library, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap | APIs Used: ALPHA ADVANTAGE API
More About Deepti Dhar’s Bright Paths Project: Welcome to Stock Market
Emily Merline’s Bright Paths Project: Writing Stats App
Emily Merline, originally from Milwaukee, WI, attended Arizona State University on a National Merit Scholarship. A highlight of college was the year she spent studying abroad at the University of Edinburgh, where she took up Scottish Country Dance. After graduating, she returned to Wisconsin to attend law school in Madison, before realizing law school wasn’t for her. She eventually moved back to Milwaukee to return to school and earned her associate degree in Web and Software Development from Milwaukee Area Technical College (MATC) in December 2020, where she was even a tutor for the web development program. Emily also interned with the Wisconsin Department of Transportation on the team responsible for the DMV websites, working on a project to create a new site template using Bootstrap. She previously worked at an insurance company and created custom database queries as part of her job. In her free time, she continues to enjoy Scottish Country Dance and Contra Dance, playing video games, pursuing personal coding projects, and has built her own computer – which comes in handy for both.
Bright Paths Project: Writing Stats App
The Writing Stats App is a single-page web app for tracking work on writing projects over time. It is designed to work for both fiction and nonfiction writing projects (such as blog posts), and to track both words and minutes. It also allows tracking of time spent broken down into three categories (writing, editing, and planning). The app’s main feature is a dashboard that displays entries for tasks completed, project details, and charts. The charts allow a visualization of the breakdown of how much time was spent on different tasks, as well as productivity over time. All data can be filtered to include multiple projects in any combination, or only one. As the front end is written in React, the app is entirely dynamic.
Technology Stack: PostgreSQL, Flask, SQLAlchemy, React, Material UI, ChartJS
More About Emily Merline’s Bright Paths Project: Writing Stats App
Gabriella Savage’s Bright Paths Project: Plenti
After receiving her MBA in Business from Dartmouth, Gabriella began a career focused on banking and venture capital. Prior to Bright Paths, she earned a year’s worth of experience working in technology around software engineering projects as a Product Manager. She is passionate about the ways technology reimagines how we live and empowers human potential.
Bright Paths Project: Plenti
This FinTech app allows users to invest in a portfolio in their favorite brands or companies (DoorDash, Lululemon, Target, Costco, Amazon, etc.) for a set amount each month. The goal is to close the investment gap for lower-income individuals, build confidence, and make investing fun and personal.
Technology Stack: Python, Flask, Javascript, HTML, CSS | APIs Used: GOOGLE API, Stock market API (Polygon, Alpha Vantage)
(Editor’s Note: This post will be updated when Gabriella’s project link is available)
Jessica Chapdelaine’s Bright Paths Project: Nanjo: Fitness Tracker
Jessica was attracted to the stability, broad career paths, and growth the tech field offered. She completed the Bright Paths interview process, then was accepted as one of the candidates for the Perficient-sponsored SE Program. Jessica brings forward twenty years of customer service experience and recently received her Personal Training fitness certification. She hopes to use that experience in understanding the customers and client needs and to build products reflecting that expertise. The tech industry is new territory for Jessica, but she is prepared to continue her learning during the full-stack software engineering bootcamp. She is learning to take a step back and appreciate the journey and growth thus far and envisioning what the future holds, in learning and development in this vast new career.
Bright Paths Project: Nanjo: Fitness Tracker
Nanjo is a full-stack web app built end-to-end from scratch that lets users create individual profiles and customizable workouts, save them for future use, and a bodyweight tracker to see your progress. The app includes a future roadmap that will offer more accessibility features for all users, responsiveness for different devices, and additional automated testing. Jessica’s goal is to make the user profile more robust, build a larger database with premade workouts for users to select from, add web scraping images for all exercises, increase customization for workouts, and implement Search for parks in the area to enable users to take their workout outside.
Technology Stack: Languages, Python, Flask, JavaScript, Json, AJAX, SQL, HTML5, CSS, Frameworks/Others, Jinja2, jQuery, Flask, Bootstrap, SQLAlchemy, Pytest, PostgreSQL, Git, GitHub | APIs Used: Wger
More About Jessica Chapdelaine’s Bright Paths Project: Nanjo: Fitness Tracker
Joy Erdenemandakh’s Bright Paths Project: Economists’ App for Data Analysis
Joy brings experience from everything from international relations to economics to software. After working with the Indian Embassy in Mongolia, she decided to pursue public policy and became an economist. She worked with the Minnesota state government for three years as a data and policy analyst and became interested in coding due to her daily use of SAS and SQL databases (SAS advanced programming certificates, Microsoft SQL, SQL Server Reporting Services Certificate). After attending the Bright Paths Prep course and building a Myers-Briggs test with Python, she made the move to software engineering and is excited for what the future brings.
Bright Paths Project: Economists’ app for data analysis
This is an application where economists can quickly find data on different countries. Users can log in and communicate with the data team, select the countries and data associated with it, and see the countries by continent.
Technology Stack: Flask, Jinja, CSSS, Python, HTML, Jquery, Javascript, Charts JS | APIs Used: https://datahub.io/core/covid-19
More About Joy Erdenemandakh’s Bright Paths Project: Economists’ App for Data Analysis
Kellie Andersen’s Bright Paths Project: Recipe Rabbit
Kellie earned her bachelor’s degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mathematics. After working nine three-month-long co-op jobs during college, she realized that being an engineer in a plant was not what she wanted. She pivoted after graduation to a Change Management Specialist role at an automotive OEM in 2018 where she ensured changes to vehicle interiors proposed by engineers were logical and carried out properly. Once COVID hit, she lost her job and made a resolution for 2021 to learn to program. That is when she discovered Perficient’s Bright Paths program. Coding had always been an interest so she took the opportunity in hopes of making a career shift and becoming a developer. Kellie had one college programming course in C language and MATLAB, and also did some self-study of C language prior to Bright Paths, which mostly consisted of YouTube videos and practice problems found on the internet or self-made problems.
Bright Paths Project: Recipe Rabbit
Recipe Rabbit lets the user create and store their recipes, input ingredients into a search, and the app returns a list of recipes including any of those ingredients – and edits all aspects of recipes as needed. The app also has a clickable list of all recipes which sends the user to the recipe details page. There is also a list of clickable ingredients that send the user to a list of recipes that contain that one ingredient. Lastly, a list of clickable tags sends the user to a list of recipes that are tagged with that tag. The homepage and navbar have links to all of these features.
Technology Stack: Python, Flask, SQLAlchemy, SQL, PostgresSQL, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, Jinja, JSON
More About Kellie Andersen’s Bright Paths Project: Recipe Rabbit | Go to Recipe Rabbit
Kelsey Ravin’s Bright Paths Project: Mapping Fatal Police Shootings
Kelsey Ravin is a new face in the tech industry. Prior to Bright Paths, Kelsey was self-taught and used multiple resources to learn Python in under one month. She is a former social worker with experience working with individuals living with severe mental health issues, addictions, homelessness, sexual assault, and/or HIV. She earned a Bachelors in Psychology from Kent State University, graduating with departmental honors for her thesis defense on eating disorders, and obtained most of her Masters in Social Work. Kelsey discovered a love for coding in her downtime during the pandemic and was elated by the opportunity to join Perficient’s Bright Paths program. Kelsey is driven, passionate about helping others, has a deep-rooted love for learning and continued growth, and is excited to explore advancing inclusion and equity in tech through software engineering.
Bright Paths Project: Mapping Fatal Police Shootings
This project displays an interactive map using The Washington Post’s dataset of every fatal shooting in the United States by a police officer in the line of duty since January 1, 2015. The map, created using Google Maps APIs, displays a marker for every incident; when you click the marker, the details surrounding the incident are displayed. The map has a search box feature that changes the map display to a specific location, as well as normative map functionalities. The web app features the ability to sign up for an account, log in and log out, and a resources page, where logged-in users can contribute to a list of resources and organizations that address police accountability.
Technology Stack: Python, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, SQL, SQLAlchemy, jQuery, Flask, PostgreSQL, Jinja, Ajax, Bootstrap | APIs Used: Google Maps APIs (Maps JavaScript API, Places API)
More About Kelsey Ravin’s Bright Paths Project: Mapping Fatal Police Shootings
Kioshi Neal’s Bright Paths Project: Couponista
Throughout her life, Kioshi has searched for a passion to build a career around. With her years of experience in customer service and delivering technical support, Kioshi found her passion and is jumping into the tech industry feet-first with Perficient’s Bright Paths. Prior to Bright Paths, Kioshi completed a bootcamp where she studied C+ & ASP.NET, became CompTIA A+ certified, and also gained experience as a Technical Support Specialist. Her challenge-driven mindset and the skills amassed over her professional career made her into a well-rounded individual who is eager to use her skills to become a leader within an organization where she can thrive and grow.
Bright Paths Project: Couponista
Kioshi created a site that allows users to search and save online coupons. Users would be able to browse, search, and save coupon codes by creating user accounts. She created a database of coupons using couponapi.org using a tsv file and used SQLAlchemy to allow users to query the coupon database. Jinja was incorporated to provide coupon results and a form was used on the results page to save coupons and sessions to correlate a relationship between the user and the coupon being saved.
Technology Stack: Python, SQL, Jinja, SQLAlchemy | APIs Used: couponsapi.org
More About Kioshi Neal’s Bright Paths Project: Couponista
Marjana Sarker’s Bright Paths Project: 2do 2gether
Marjana received her PhD in Biomedical Sciences with a specialization in Neurobiology of Aging. She has had a rich academic research career with multiple scientific publications on aging and cognitive sciences. But with any field right now, the overabundance of unorganized and unfiltered data requires proficiency in a different set of tools. Prior education in computer science, specifically coding include completing online courses via Coursera and Udacity. She completed the Programming for everybody course from the University of Michigan and an introductory coding course (which included both Python and Javascript) via Udacity. She also did a short course on Android app development in Java via Udacity. Her curiosity and desire to learn how to use Python for data organization and building programs to evaluate data led her to sign up for online courses. However, finishing these did not get her to a level of proficiency in building programs. By joining the Perficient-sponsored Bright Paths program, Marjana now is ready to tackle big data challenges with her newly acquired software engineering toolkit!
Bright Paths Project: 2do 2gether
2do 2gether is a 30-day habit-setter with accountability partners. In this web application, the user can choose a maximum of three habits they want to accomplish in a month. They get two choices on how they want to form this habit: in hours or days. For example, if a user chose hours, they will set a goal to accrue said hours of the activity within one month. The user can also write journal entries whether they complete or don’t complete a task on said day and they can track their progress for each habit. The most exciting feature of this app is the option of having an accountability partner who they can partner up with for a habit, check on one another’s progress, and send encouraging messages. The partner is also working on the same habit as the user.
Technology Stack: Python: Flask, SQLAlchemy, Datetime, Jinja; Database: PostgreSQL; Javascript: jQuery, AJAX; Styling: Bootstrap, HTML/CSS
More About Marjana Sarker’s Bright Paths Project: 2do 2gether
We are blown away by the talent in the first Perficient Bright Paths class and wish each student success as we all take one step closer to helping close the gender gap in the tech industry.
At Perficient, we continually look for ways to champion and challenge our talented workforce with interesting projects for high-profile clients, encourage personal and professional growth through training and mentoring, and celebrate our people-oriented culture and the innovative ways they serve Perficient and the community.
Learn more about what it’s like to work at Perficient at our Careers page.
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