Meet My Mentee Melanie

I am so proud of my Hackbright mentee, Melanie Warrick. She has been working really hard and every time I meet with her or exchange emails with her, I marvel at how smart she is and how much she has picked up in such a short time. Whoever snags her as an employee is one lucky person. Here's the bio she wrote for Hackbright Career Day:

After getting my MBA from GWU, I worked for 12+ years in management consulting for companies like Accenture and Alvarez & Marsal. I focused on improving efficiency and enhancing customer experience through project management and business analytics with companies ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500. Last year, a major life event helped me take stock. What makes life worth living are the challenges that drive me to grow and learn. I've always been interested in technology, but I perceived barriers to entry when I was younger. I am keenly aware of how pervasive technology is in our lives and its exponential growth. Thus, I realized recently that I want to take on the challenge to learn how to speak its language, build things and solve problems with what I can build. Hackbright gave me the opportunity to test my interests, and proved my insatiable desire to learn "all the things." My career goal is to continue growing software engineering skills and exploring interests in data analytics and machine learning.

Her final project at Hackbright is a weather app called "Sun Finder." Basically, Sun Finder helps you figure out where you can find the sun in San Francisco. She worked with APIs from Weather Underground and Forecast.io for weather data and Google Places & Maps for search functionality and map results. Some of the technologies she used include Python, Flask (including Login and WTForms), SQL, SQLAlchemy, Postgres, Javascript, Twitter Bootstrap, and jQuery. Here she is demoing her app to previous Hackbright students at Hackbright Alumnight:




It's crazy that she'll be graduating this week--how time flies [when you're not the one doing a bootcamp, ha]! She is going to go so far, and I can't wait to watch her spring into the tech world. I'm very happy to be her reference and connect her with anyone who wants connecting.

Congratulations for making it through Hackbright, Melanie!

P.S. More people should try out being a mentor--it's really rewarding!