HowMich

Inspiration

The issue being explored is the difficulty of job searching for parents with children due to the lack of resources and concise information not being widely available. This leads to wasting valuable time and the possibility of being taken advantage of by large companies.

What it does

Our project aims to provide a service for parents looking for a job that combines all the information needed to be able to work and be a father/mother simultaneously. This includes:

Salary
Location- within 20 miles
Job category
Hours
Number of kids

How we built it

The website was written in Flutter, and the back end combined Python, Google Cloud Functions, and a web scraper from Apify. The Flutter app calls the Google Cloud Function, which runs a Python function that runs the Glassdoor web scrapper from Apify and processes the resulting data according to the user's inputs on the form in our Flutter site. Finally, the Flutter site updates to display suitable job recommendations for the user.

Challenges we ran into

Trying to use mainstream web development frameworks
Connecting our Python code/scripts to the API web scraping procedure
Being able to find data that works well with our project needs and goals
Understanding how to use APIs and be able to apply them to the backend portion of our project

Accomplishments that we're proud of

HowMich positively impacts parents worldwide, allowing for more stability and fulfilling family life experiences. These impacts are not limited to the following:

Lower risk of corporate exploitation
Saves time and allows for more time to be spent with family/children
More job options available for parents within close proximity
Less financial stress to be able to live and provide
Easy and accessible way to be able to gather the information that best suits the individual looking for employment with children
User-friendly UI that can be used across various platforms such as iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux

What we learned

Learning how to use APIs
Developing efficient methods of data collection
Understanding how to combine frontend and backend
Communicating between different portions of the project, such as the Flutter front end and the Google Cloud Function backend.

What's next for HowMich

We hope to expand our form to incorporate more nuanced questions and incorporate more metrics into our algorithm. We also hope to expand to collecting potential employment opportunities from other sites such as Indeed. Finally, we want to make our code and infrastructure more permanent and add features to help parents search for jobs.