One-stop-shop for your financial information needs
After attending LA Hacks in 2018 and having a really good experience, I wanted to come back in 2019 with even higher aspirations! Fortunately, I was accompanied by a group of liked minded fiends: Dianna, Frank, Jim, Joey and myself. Collectively, we covered the basics of software engineering and web development during weekly study sessions held throughout winter quarter to prepare for the up comming competition.
Our choice to select Web as the technology with which to build our App is largely infuluenced by my positive exprience buliding a Web application during winter break (see this post). We also held brainstorming sessions and generated tons of good App ideas. However, without knowing what APIs sponsors will bring and more exposure to Web Dev, it was hard to judge the relative difficulty of implementing each idea. So we decided to just study as much about the web stack as possible before the competition, and leave the rest until when we arrive XD.
It is truly amazing how much our idea and the app evolved within 36 hours. Initially, we came up with esoteric ideas like news system for self driving cars, because a sponsor brought an SDK for interfacing with autonomous veichles. But as we pursued them for details, we realized that the SDK exported limited functionalities, and it couldn’t provide the level of control we wanted. As we explored other options, a more concrete idea took shape: Blackrock provides an API for calculating the performance/risks and other indicators of a portfolio of stocks. Twilio has an API for SMS messages. Other companies has APIs for real-time stock prices and news. We have all the ingredients we need to build a monitoring system for an investment portfolio, combining features not seen in software available to individual investors.
Without future ado, the following video demnostrates the workflow of our app:
In the homepage, the user could:
After the user is done entering information on the home page, he or she can proceed to the portfolio page, which shows the following
Futuremore, examples of text messages sent to our uses are as follows:
Overall, this competition has been a really rewarding experience. If someone were to ask me how complete of a product we can make before the competition, I would not give a very confident answer. The amount of work we accomplished and the the number of technical difficulties we overcame in such short time far exeeded my expectations.
Even though we did not win an award, I believe we are very close to the winning teams in terms of completeness, aesthetics, and innovation. We had pretty positive reviews from the judges. If only we could implement one or two more features like voice assist, and better plotting, an award would be within grasp.
And look at a picture of us after the competition, don’t we look like we are ready for the next challenge, whatever it might be?
