Inspiration
Our entire team had never been to a hackathon before, and since one of our members had experience with finance, we decided to tackle a growing problem in society today, debt.
What it does
Our project takes customer data from Capital One using their API, Nessie. It allows the user to input their debts (credit card, student loans, etc.). The app will take a fixed portion of all deposits to the account to pay off the debt, and optimize the payments to each debt the customer has. All the monthly payments will be paid off first, and the rest will be distributed to debts with the highest interest rate to minimize the total interest payments in the long run. Warning messages will also be sent when withdrawals exceed a limit.
How I built it
The project was built with a Flask back-end which handles all the requests to the Capital One API and all the financial calculations. The front-end was built using jQuery and handles all the user input, and displays customer balances, and debts.
Challenges I ran into
We had significant difficulties with basically everything we did. As none of us had done web development before, we had problems communicating with the Capital One API, creating our own RESTful API and designing and connecting with the web app.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Given that none of us had done anything like this before, I am extremely proud that I managed to learn how an API works, create my own API, and handle get and post requests with barely any sleep at all.
What I learned
I learned how to program with Flask and jQuery, and how to work with APIs.
What's next for Debt Free Me
The next step would be to make the user interface much, much better. Given the time constraints and our lack of experience, we only have a basic webpage running.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.