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Our Logo
Inspiration
In light of the recent tone shift in terms of climate progress for private US companies, we decided that it was time to let the people decide where best to put their money.
What it does
EcoLens is a dashboard where users can create their own stock watchlist to compare the 'report cards' of different companies - powered by Google Gemini analytics.
How we built it
We built this using an HTML/JS -> Flask -> MySQL stack, designed by Dillon. We started on Friday night by constructing the login system and the empty dashboard. Most of Saturday morning was spent trying to find a reliable data source. Eventually, after designing a Gemini data pipeline, we began implementing that and features to the dashboard, such as custom user watchlists and related companies. Dillon handled the backend, database, and API integration, as well as designing the dashboard. Kali handled some of the frontend & logo design.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into so many challenges! The biggest one by far was accessing sustainability data. Because there is no standard or required reporting for sustainability, querying public data is difficult or impossible at scale. Free APIs to get this info are also extremely hard to come by, if not non-existent. That's when Gemini saved us. By having it use the google search tool to find current news, stats and other info on a per-company basis during the loading phase, it allows for a truly comparable scale.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are very proud of the seamless frontend-backend integration. Everything loads super fast due to our pre-populating database setup. We're also proud of the Gemini data pipeline.
What we learned
We learned a lot of technical skills: This was Kali's first time writing HTML, and this was Dillon's first time using Flask with MySQL and HTML/JS. But more importantly, we learned a lot about teamwork. While we had some arguments, ultimately we came together to do what's best and create a product we're super proud of.
What's next for EcoLens
A huge step for EcoLens would be to secure some early funding. This would allow us to access those expensive data APIs that are too pricy for broke college students. We would love to include some stronger metrics, both to feed to Gemini and for our own grading system. It would also allow us to pay for some cloud hosting (maybe AWS or Azure) so that we can move this project off my laptop and into a usable state.
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