Inspiration

Our inspiration came from the all-too-common experience of going out to a restaurant with a group of friends and having to split payments. Restaurants of today do not have an easy way for customers to split their payments among multiple people and payment methods, greatly complicating the payment process for both the customer and the business.

What it does

Banana Payments provides a way for businesses to seamlessly allow customers to split payments among multiple people by shifting the payment processor from a physical Point-of-Sale device to the customers cell phone.

How we built it

We built the front-end for Banana Payments with Svelte. For our back-end, we built a REST API using Node and Express.js and hosted it on a single e2-micro instance with Google Cloud Platform Free Tier. Our API server primarily serves as an interface to MongoDB Atlas, which we use for our database.

Challenges we ran into

  • Interfacing with MongoDB Atlas via mongoose proved to be quite challenging. As this was the first time any of us had used this library, we were unfamiliar with it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Competing in our first hackathon
  • Building an MVP that could easily be fleshed out into a real product

What we learned

We learned how to build a full-stack web application using Svelte, MongoDB, Node, and Express.

What's next for Banana Payments

Continuing to make improvements to the application as a method of project-based learning.

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