After sorting through many outstanding applications and interviewing some amazing candidates, we struggled with the choice of picking a candidate. Our choice came down …
After sorting through many outstanding applications and interviewing some amazing candidates, we struggled with the choice of picking a candidate. Our choice came down to Alyssa Ravasio, who will be one of two winners of the Github scholarship for Femgineer’s Ship It course this summer.
Alyssa Ravasio was chosen for a project that she is building called Hipcamp, a search engine for campsites in California.
Hipcamp will solve the problems of “Where can I camp next weekend?” or more specifically, “Where can I camp next weekend by a beach and within a 3 hour drive from SF?”
The project came out of her experience just this year, when she went camping with her family and had to go through the frustrating process of making a campground reservation.
Alyssa went to sites such as parks.ca.gov and reserveamerica.com, but they offered no additional data or pictures. This forced Alyssa to go to additional sites like Yelp for campground reviews, as well as doing a Google image search for pictures.
After much work she was finally able to make her reservation at Andrew Molera State Park. But when she arrived, she discovered that it was home to the sweetest left breaking waves, a relevant piece of information that was missed from her research.
Driving back home to get her wetsuit, Alyssa was determined to build something better that would take the pain out of finding and reserving a campsite.
In addition to time-based search, Alyssa is planning to develop maps, photographs, and video into Hipcamp.
Alyssa’s project has been an example of Github and Femgineer’s efforts to get more women into tech and build a more female-friendly engineering culture.
Github recently held their Passion Project series that highlights prominent, smart, and interesting women in the technology/startup/developer world.
Their sponsorship of this scholarship is an extension of their efforts to promote women who are doing outstanding work in software engineering and following their passions to build products.
Right now Alyssa is at the ideation stage. But with the Femgineer Ship It course, Alyssa is hoping to take it to the next level under the guidance of Poornima.
Alyssa Ravasio recently graduated student from Dev Bootcamp, the nine week intensive web development course. She also graduated from UCLA where she created the individual major Digital Democracy, which focuses on how the internet is changing the world. She worked in Internet policy at the US Department of State, sales/marketing for the iPad startup Revel, and operations at the outdoor adventure startup Xola.
Besides the Internet, Alyssa is also passionate about journalism, film, art, and the ocean. She believes that the Internet’s potential to change the way our world works lies on a magnitude that can only be compared to language itself!
Stay tuned to see Alyssa’s progress by following her @alyraz and checking out Hipcamp!
