How Career Fingerprint got its start

man in blue long sleeve shirt holding woman in gray sweater

On December 27, 2024, I was helping my wife get ready for a late family Christmas gathering when I received a video call from my supervisor.  I was the lead software engineer for a company that I loved, and it was a role that challenged me and helped me grow. On the call, I was presented with two options: either go part time or resign due to budget cuts. As the father of two small children and the husband of a stay-at-home-mom, I was terrified of not being able to adequately provide for my family. I entered 2025 with the goal of finding a new role while still working part time. I filled out a sea of job applications and interviewed with numerous recruiters and hiring managers to no avail. I knew that I had skills, experience and technical know-how, but when I got into a job interview, my mind kept drawing a blank. I would routinely think of the perfect response to an interview question after the interview was over. Additionally, my notes for all of the different interviews became disorganized as I started to fill multiple notebooks with them.

 

One night, I was practicing a coding skill by building a note-taking application. I realized that I could potentially solve my organization problem and my interview problem by putting everything on one screen. So, I created a rough draft of an app wherein the log of achievements I wanted to tell interviewers about, the job description, previous notes and my resumé were on the same screen I was using to take notes. Everything was right at my fingertips without any fumbling!

First version of the meeting screen.

 

After using this rough draft app for a while, I made tweaks and really integrated it into my routine. I even started to use it in meetings outside of job interviews! At this point, my wife and I looked at each other and realized that other people could benefit from this tool. She served as my project manager and we built out more features, such as the meeting scheduler, prep for internal meetings, and resume builder. We worked together during nap times and after the kids went to bed to build this into a fully-fledged web application. From there, Career Fingerprint was born!