LGBTech

Inspiration

As a queer person pursuing a career in tech, I know that tech-forward workspaces can often be hostile to queer people. In fact, according to Business Insider, 40% of LGBTQ+ tech employees have witnessed homophobic discrimination and harassment at work. In order to address this, I wanted to build a website that allows people in LGBTQ+ community to find inclusive workspaces and help others find inclusive workspaces to build tech careers. Economic empowerment is so important, so I hope my project can help make tech more inclusive for the queer community.

What it does

LGBTech allows users to rate companies based on whether they are queer-inclusive so people can make informed decisions on which jobs to apply to, and allows users to add companies that haven’t already been added in order to build a crowdsourced database of queer-inclusive tech companies. It also includes a queer safety map of the United States, which color codes states based on LGBTQ+ rights and legal protections and shows LGBTQ+ rights by state, and links to LBGTQ+ scholarships for college students and others pursuing secondary education. Lastly, LGBTech includes a queer mentor directory which is linked to a Google Form, allowing people to search for mentors based on industries or topics.

How we built it

I built LGBTech using React with React Router for client-side routing and localStorage for persisting user votes and scholarship selections. The queer safety map is made with react-simple-maps and a static JSON dataset to display state-level safety information. Mentor matching is implemented with a Google Sheet backend, fetched as JSON, allowing users to filter by industry or topic without requiring a database. Company inclusivity scores are calculated dynamically from user votes, and the UI is styled with a rainbow-inspired theme for accessibility and visual appeal.

Challenges we ran into

This was my first time working on a hackathon project by myself instead of in a team. From previous hackathons I’ve gone to, I have a good sense of the scope of a project that is reasonable for 3-4 people to accomplish in a 24-hour period, but I was a bit unsure of what I can individually accomplish within the allocated time. This made planning and ideating difficult, and I had to pivot and simplify my ideas so I could have a final project. From a technical perspective, react-simple-maps are only compatible with earlier versions of React, which was a challenge since I had been using a non-compatible version of React prior to adding the map.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I normally ideate and brainstorm by bouncing ideas off my teammates and combining our ideas to form our final project, so I’m proud of having a strong concept that I feel strongly about: making tech careers more inclusive for the LGBTQ+ community. I’m also proud of completing a hackathon project solo.

What we learned

I gained hands-on experience with React Router for client-side routing and learned how to use localStorage for front-end persistence. I also learned how to use sheet.best to pull information from Google Sheets.

What's next for LGBTech

Next, I would improve the matching algorithm for mentor matching, allowing users to input more interests and be matched to mentors, possibly exploring a classical machine learning approach. Also, I’m currently using Google Sheets and React localStorage to store information, so I would incorporate a database for better scalability.

Built With

• react
• sheet.best