Matilda

Matilda aims to optimize the job search process for those in most urgent need but little to no experience, using conversational AI to match candidates with the best opportunities to their skillset and needs, while adapting the aspect of human interaction to social distancing realities.

Matilda was a summer project that I worked on over the summer of 2020 (for around 3 months) with two other friends. This was my first time being fully exposed to the amazing world of running a tech startup and doing full-stack web development. Beyond writing pure software, I got to experience things like applying for grants, running user research, managing a large codebase, etc.

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Product Management

Through running Matilda, I learned a lot about product management. I learned that making great software goes much beyond writing code that runs. We set our very own OKRs (objective and key-results) after following John Doerr’s book called “Measure What Matters”. We applied through grants, wrote our mission statement, and used design thinking processes like empathy maps to create a valuable product that users will enjoy.

Matilda’s OKRs when we ran it during the summer of 2020.

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User Research grid.

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Sample of User Research Results.

Software Development

From a software perspective, I also played a major role in ensuring that all parts of our platform integrated together, from the website, to our scrapping algorithms, to our job search technologies, and conversational chatbot.

Frontend

The frontend was built in Angular. This was the first time I was exposed to this frontend framework, so it was a great learning experience! We spent a lot of time thinking about the design and the layout of the pages before actually proceeding with coding it.

THE HTML/CSS was written from scratch, we did not use Bootstrap or any other frontend libraries.

Backend

The backend was built using Firestore. I wrote cloud functions to maintain the database and automatically delete useless entries.

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Profile page.

Authentication using OAuth.

Job Matching

The key functionality of our platform is job matching and the conversational chatbot. We started with using Dialogflow, Google’s chatbot API technology, to implement basic conversational features. Then, in terms of the job search, I scrapped jobs from various sites, stored them on Firestore, and ran Elasticsearch to quickly find the relevant jobs.

Matilda recommending some software jobs to the user.

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Bookmarked jobs.

Built With

• HTML
• CSS
• Javascript
• Angular
• Angular Firestore
• Dialogflow
• Elasticsearch
• Heroku (for deployment)

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