FirmHunt

Slideshow: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1BJEUwdfAWVf6-qjZng1Or17sECfrJ9FBKSegBg5254c/edit?usp=sharing

Inspiration

Honestly, is it bad to say our biggest inspiration was one of HackTX's sponsors...?

In all seriousness, we've all had times where we go to a company's website, spend 5 minutes there, and leave not knowing a SINGLE THING about what they actually do. Between all the marketing and buzzwords it's hard to understand what many companies are about nowadays. Yet, this information would useful for so many: we took the perspective of a lowly intern in search of a job, and thought about a tool that could help: what if you could have a companion tag along on your next job search? What if it could get rid of all the bs and just tell you what a company is about? What if it could describe what your day-to-day would look like at any given company, and tell you about a company's reputation? So long are the days of esoteric marketing speak, here come the days of efficient browsing!

What it does

FirmHunt is a Chrome extension to help developers find out what companies actually do. Here are some of its features:

access a company description based on its webpage and wikipedia article
see tags about what industries company is in
view the company's reputation, measured by sentiment analysis on the past 100 news articles released about the company with Google Cloud Natural Language*
talk to FirmHunt AI and ask questions about a company not included in its original description*
ability to see how large a company is in industry, based on financial indicators*
save companies you've browsed and get recommendations based on the ones you've saved*

* = due to lack of time, these features are not in a demo state. This is our first hackathon, and 3/4 of us are freshmen :)

How we built it

The Chrome Extension was designed in Figma and written in JSX using the React framework. For our backend, we used MongoDB Atlas for our database and an Amazon AWS EC2 instance for hosting the Express backend running on Node.js. We organized our team and ideation with GitHub and Trello.

Challenges we ran into

Biting off more than we could chew
Lots of issues with MongoDB. The utguest network blocks the port to connect to MongoDB which hindered us for hours. MongoDB's schema validation was a huge headache.
Google Cloud never sent us a voucher to use them despite having requested it at the beginning of the hackathon... so we had to hastily pull together an AWS instance

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Divided work into sprints so we could keep track of how advanced our project was and adjust goals
Completed first sprint! Lots of checklist things done
Great organization in project management tools (Trello)
Figma --> actual React components, pretty good 1:1
Lots of teamwork
Each member had substantial (equal) contribution

What we learned

Lots of us took on new things we had never known before. We all learned a new framework, language, tool, etc.
Importance of working with team (having another set of eyes)
Time management, knowing when to stop (more like knowing when to find a workaround/be adaptable)