DreamCatcher

Inspiration

The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page. Of course, if books were as expensive as traveling is, they would cost 10000% more (don't quote us on this). Nevertheless, traveling IS a lot of stress. It requires possibly coordinating vacation time for multiple people, school, money, responsibilities, children, and a myriad of things that can go wrong. We believe that the most stressful part of traveling is considering your budget. We wanted to facilitate and make this aspect easier.

What it does

Using your bank information to extrapolate information about your socioeconomic status, we are able to give recommendations for places that you can afford to go and have a good time without worrying too much about money. Furthermore we also give the option to the user to tell us where they want to go. We then, give them a realistic plan for them to get there.

How we built it

The website is hosted in Microsoft Azure. Its backbone is css and javascript and its muscles are jquery and ajax. We used python on the back end to create dummy data for the nessie API (to test our website with) and django to warp Amadeus API before accessing it from our site. We also used linear regression to identify the pattern of the user finances. This allows us to do predictions about their future and how soon they will be able to go to their dream vacation.

Challenges we ran into

We were expecting data from Capital One, so we spent a lot of time trying to figure out why we couldn't get the response we expected. Source control was a headache as some us were used to solo our projects, and thus, were inexperienced with it and we kept rewriting over our files.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to finish the main functionalities that we were aiming for. We believe we effectively combined both APIs and condense them into a new functionality. We are also personally proud of our teamwork. We complimented each other weaknesses and strengths, as well as working great as a team.

What we learned

Some of us had to learn a new language to be able to contribute effectively to the team. We also had to learn protocols and standards of working in a team. This was the first time for most of us working with more than one API, so it was a good experience and a good taste of the real world.

What's next for DreamCatcher

As a traveling app, DreamCatcher should in the future implement most functionalities that can be found in such apps. Expand on the use of Amadeus API to use it to it's full potential, and expand the options that the user can query. In addition, it'd be convenient to allow the user to pay for their tickets from our website as they already have their information in. More complicated models could be implemented, right now we are assuming the data can be modeled by a linear function. This may or may not be the case.