🧭 TrailBlazer — Find Your Career Path

An AI-powered career roadmap generator for engineering students. Enter your branch, year, interests, and target role — get a personalized visual roadmap, skill gap analysis, project ideas, and a custom study plan. Built for the Creative Showcase Hackathon 2026.

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🚀 Live Demo

👉 https://trailblazer-xo24.onrender.com/

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✨ Features

• 🎯 Personalized Roadmap — AI-generated career path based on your branch, year, skills, and target role
• 🎰 Slot Machine Persona Reveal — fun animated reveal of your "Career Persona" (e.g. The Builder, The Algorithm Whisperer)
• 📊 Skill Gap Snapshot — see exactly which skills you have vs. still need for your target role, by name
• 📚 Adaptive Resources — links to specific learning resources for your missing skills; switches to next-step content when you're fully covered
• 🛠️ Project Ideas — 3 concrete, buildable project suggestions tailored to your target role
• 📅 Study Plan Builder — pick 1, 2, or 3 hours/day and get a week-by-week plan with break weeks and fun motivational lines
• 📋 Copy My Result — one-click copy of your full roadmap as shareable text
• ⚡ Dual Autosuggest — custom-built prefix search engine + bootcamp's multi-algorithm API (Brute Force, Binary Search, Trie) running silently in parallel
• 🔄 LLM + Fallback — Groq LLM generates personalized roadmaps; rule-based fallback ensures the app never breaks

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🛠️ Tech Stack

Layer	Technology
Frontend	HTML, CSS, JavaScript
Backend	Node.js, Express
AI	Groq API (LLaMA 3.3 70B)
Autosuggest	Custom prefix-search engine + Bootcamp AutoSuggest API
Deployment	Render

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📁 Project Structure

TrailBlazer/
├── index.html          # Main frontend
├── logo.png            # App logo
├── css/
│   └── style.css       # All styles
├── js/
│   ├── app.js          # Main app logic
│   ├── autosuggest.js  # Custom autosuggest engine
│   ├── data.js         # Skills, roles, resources dataset
│   └── roadmap.js      # Rule-based fallback roadmap generator
└── backend/
    ├── server.js       # Express server + Groq LLM integration
    ├── package.json
    └── .env.example    # Environment variable template

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⚙️ Run Locally

1. Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/GeethaBurigalla/TrailBlazer.git
cd TrailBlazer

2. Install dependencies

cd backend
npm install

3. Set up environment variables

cp .env.example .env
# Open .env and add your Groq API key

4. Start the server

node server.js

5. Open in browser

http://localhost:6700

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🔑 Environment Variables

Variable	Description
GROQ_API_KEY	Your Groq API key — get one free at console.groq.com
PORT	Port to run the server on (default: 6700)

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🎯 How It Works

1. Student enters their branch, year of study, target role, and skills/interests
2. Skills are powered by a custom-built autosuggest engine (prefix search over a curated dataset), running alongside the bootcamp's multi-algorithm API for comparison
3. On submit, the app calls the Groq LLM with a structured prompt to generate a personalized roadmap — if the LLM fails for any reason, a rule-based fallback generates a roadmap instantly
4. Results include a Career Persona, 4-stage roadmap, named skill gap, adaptive resources, project ideas, and a weekly study plan

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👩‍💻 Built By

Geetha Burigalla — Pre-final year B.Tech CSE student at BVRIT
GitHub: @GeethaBurigalla

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📄 License

MIT License — feel free to use, modify, and build on this!