Background

Geek Girl Careers is an online service that helps guide women into careers in science, technology, engineering, and math. It previously existed as Jobs Nirvana, which was a similar service, but not targeted specifically at women. The key factor in the technology behind both Jobs Nirvana and Geek Girl Careers is a personality assessment taken by users, which provides rich insights into an individual's personal strengths. In conjunction with user-selected preferences, the system is able to provide guidance and direction for young women entering the professional world.

Technology

The system backbone is written in PHP and MySQL, running on a Linux+Apache server. The site uses a dual-framework setup, with one half running on Core and the other half running on Wordpress. Wordpress was selected for the ability to manage posts and pages, as well as for layering phpBB/bbPress on top of it to provide forums capabilities.

Interesting Challenges

AVA assessment integration

In order to gauge a person's strengths and personality, the user takes the AVA Assessment at the beginning of their experience with the service. We had some special requirements for the AVA integration, and we worked closely with their API developers to get a tailor-made integration. The data returned by the assessment drives much of our career-guidance algorithms.

RSS & HTML scraping

In order to bring relevant content to users, we have developed an RSS and HTML reader that parses articles from external sources, and brings the data into our database. We use a cultivated list of sources, and allow expert users to contribute articles to the database. Some deep parsing of the RSS and HTML occurs, including pulling out specific bits of data to correctly categorize the content within our system.