BeaverHacks Spring 2021 Hackathon Project
Try it here: https://savebucksproject.herokuapp.com/
This project was inspired by a popular debate in the personal finance world about whether or not people should enjoy small splurges like Starbucks coffee. Some financial advisors, for example, Ramit Sethi says it is completely unnecessary and people should focus on how much they can grow their income instead of how much they can cut their expenses. On the other hand, some experts, such as the "Shark Tank" investor Kevin O'Leary, advises people to never pay $2.50 for a cup of coffee. He argues that people should instead make coffee at home for 20 cents per cup and invest the difference. We appreciate that it is easy to get bogged down financially with seemingly inconsequential purchases. With that in mind, we hope that this website will encourage the user to examine not just their coffee-buying habits, but also other daily purchases, subscriptions, etc., and see how they can really start making progress towards larger financial goals.
Our web app allows the user to choose a Starbucks drink and the number of cups they have on a daily basis. It then shows them the financial value of making coffee at home as well as the potential future gains if they choose to invest the extra money on a daily basis. We also recommend our favorite ground coffee using Amazon affiliate links and incorporate a Twitter button for the user to share our web app with their friends and family.
We used VS Code as our text editor and collaborated via GitHub. Rachel is in charge of the UI, and Frances is in charge of the functionalities. Languages and tools we used to build this project include HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Bootstrap, Node JS.
We could not find an open-source Starbucks menu API, so we built a mock API and hosted it on Heroku. Then, we used the Fetch API method to populate our dropdown menu, and fetch the data we need to do our calculations. This turned out to be a great learning opportunity.
We are very proud of our user interface, our coffee API, and our algorithm to calculate compound interest. We are also very proud of finishing our first Hackathon!
Rachel: I used Bootstrap and Fetch API for the first time while working on this project. Before this project, I also didn't really know what an API was, and have now implemented a mock API into a web app!
Frances: For this project, I created a mock API for the first time. I found a good Youtube tutorial that really helped me reach this goal. I also learned to collaborate with my teammate via GitHub and read MDN documentation.
We also learned late in our project about the mobile-first design philosophy. Although we did retroactively build-in mobile responsiveness, in the future we would start by designing for mobile devices, which would make for a more seamless responsive design process overall.
We are planning to set up a database for our app and enable the user to customize their own homemade coffee recipe and submit it to our database. We could also add more options for adjustments in drink sizes and additions to their Starbucks drinks to output a more accurate picture of the user's habits and savings potential. They will also be able to rank their favorite homemade coffee recipes. Our ultimate goal is to build a community that encourages people to start small with their personal finance journey and get creative with their coffee, tea, and other daily habits. For monetization of our web app, we would use Amazon affiliate links and would share our income with recipe creators. We are also planning to develop an iOS app and an Android app. We are motivated to learn new tech stacks and let our imagination run wild!