BudgeThing

Inspiration

In the beginning, we each came to the hackathon as individuals. Eventually, we all met up and decided to collaborate on some sort of project. Since this was the first hackathon for all of us, we were lost and did not know what to do. Since we did not have any ideas, I suggested looking for ideas to be inspired by on the AppIdeas and SomebodyMakeThis subreddits on Reddit. After a while, James came up with an idea to create a wireless mouse by using a smartphone camera on Android. About 5 minutes later I proposed a budgeting app or website to help people save money and keep track of expenses. Since our team was not very experienced in hardware, we decided to go ahead and learn the ways of the web developer. In the google doc I shared, I lacked the creativity to give it an appropriate title and called it" Budget Thing". Rahul jokingly suggested we call our project that, and with that suggestion I saw the chance to make a pun and BudgeThing was created.

What it does

BudgeThing helps users with common budgeting tasks such as disposable income calculations, setting savings goals, and Equated Monthly Installment loan calculations.

How we built it

We used one of my existing domains and hosting plans to host the BudgeThing website. We used the trinity of web dev tools, HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript along with the Chart.js library to implement dynamic infographics. We used Paint 2 and Microsoft Paint for graphics.

Challenges we ran into

Our main challenge stemmed from trying to use languages we had not worked with before. We had to learn what CDN library hosting was, how to use libraries, how to set up a website, and how to combine JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3 in a single page to provide a useful and aesthetically pleasing product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are particularly proud of being able to finally create a working dynamic pie chart. After eight hours of work, we were finally able to accomplish this seemingly trivial task. Also, the accurate mathematics and visually appealing nature of our website took a lot of effort.