Our project stemmed from the trending GraphQL API standard which has attracted a lot of developers recently due to its more efficient approach over the popular RESTful APIs. We decided to tackle GitHub's GraphQL API and formed the following idea:

SkillMap enables small-scale and medium-sized startups to outsource their remote work to far and near regions in every nook and corner of the globe where the required skills are available but are hard to bring in-house due to long-distance and urbanization challenges.

What it does

  • Map a GitHub user's location along with their skillsets and brief experience
  • Showcase a visual representation of the 'hot' skills in location searched

How we built it

  • Github's v4 (GraphQL) API
  • Google Maps API
  • React JS Framework
  • HTML, CSS, JS, JQuery

Challenges we ran into

GraphQL API is awesome but it's very new so it has limited errors answered and limited possible schemas as well. For instance, unlike GitHub's v3 RESTful API, the GraphQL one doesn't provide any method to fetch 'All users' which actually made us struggle quite a bit.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of just being able to create an app, which may not be fully functional right now but has great potential both as a project and as a business product.

What we learned

Two team members were absolute beginners, so you can imagine how much they learned in such an exciting environment. Besides, we all learned a lot about the GraphQL standard (of course), Github's API's limitations and benefits and also some of React's intricacies.

What's next for SkillMap

It's further development. Improve the visualization, make it a two-side site i.e. recruiters as well people looking ot move to places where their skills are in-demand. Also include 'mutations' feature of GraphQL so that we can perhaps create issues in the people repos or star their repos throughtthe app without having to browse to GitHub.

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