BudgetSurf

Inspiration

We are a team of students interested in learning full-stack web development and learning how to develop and deploy an application using the MERN stack, and we were inspired by the PIMCO challenge to make a financial literacy app for college students, so we decided to create BudgetSurf.

What it does

BudgetSurf is an interactive web application that allows a user to login and authenticate or create a new account, then an interactive pie chart is shown with categories for their budget. From there, the user can see the category name and current monetary value of each portion of the pie, or mouse over a portion of the chart to reveal a card that shows each individual expense inside the category. These cards also allow the user to input new data into the budget or remove data.

How we built it

We built the app using Express, Node, and MongoDB/Mongoose for the backend, and the frontend was built in React, JSX, and CSS, and they communicate with each other using Axios to call our backend API.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges was our lack of knowledge of many important concepts in react coming into the project, so it was very rewarding to push through them and solve each problem as it came, learning more after each issue solved.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

No one on our team has developed a full-stack MERN app to this extent before, and we're very proud that we've built a robust backend with an API and learned how to call it with our interactive react frontend using Axios, a technology none of us had ever used before. We're also proud of our commitment and ability to develop from start to finish and work through any development issues together that we may have had.

What we learned

Every member on our team gained a massive amount of knowledge over the last day of development and learning. Our front end team has learned many incredibly useful parts of react such as routing, use states, and contexts, and our back end developer learned a great deal about APIs, full-stack integration, and Mongoose. Overall, the knowledge gained will be very useful going forward with our future projects, and we're all looking forward to learning more as we go on.

What's next for Developers

As for what's next for us, all three of our members are starting development on our capstone projects for school, and we have all chosen to build full-stack web applications, so the knowledge and experience we gained from Tamuhack will be absolutely instrumental in building any further applications in the future.