Inspiration
We're a team of freshmen at Rice, and we're constantly amazed by how diverse Houston is. We were inspired by our friends from all over the world. For them, simple things like sending money home or just understanding a budget in a new country can be really tough. We wanted to build a simple tool to help, something that felt like it was made for Houston's international community.
What it does
Finance Connect helps Houston's international community manage their money across borders. It's a web app with a live map of the city as the background. You can type in any Houston ZIP code, and the map instantly flies to that location. A simple sidebar menu slides out to give you a currency converter that uses live, up-to-the-minute exchange rates, so you know exactly how much you're sending or spending.
How we built it
As beginners, we decided to split our team in two: a front-end team and a back-end team.
The front-end (what you see and click on) is built with React. We used the Mapbox API to bring the map to life.
The back-end (the brain of the operation) is a Python API that Imad, our back-end developer, built from scratch. It handles all the serious stuff like user profiles and the currency rate calculations.
Challenges we ran into
Honestly, our biggest challenge was that none of us had ever connected a front-end to a back-end before! We spent hours figuring out why the two parts wouldn't talk to each other, finally learning about a browser security rule called CORS and how to fix it. We also had to learn how to create a perfect "contract" so the front-end knew exactly how to ask the back-end for information. Just getting the map to load by figuring out how to use an API token felt like a huge win.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're just incredibly proud that we got it all working! As freshmen, building a "full-stack" application in a weekend felt like a huge mountain to climb. We successfully integrated a live map, fetched data from our own Python API, and built an interface that actually works. We did it!
What we learned
Teamwork isn't just about coding together; it's about clear communication, especially when you're all learning at the same time. We learned that to solve a problem, you first have to really understand the people facing it.
What's next for Finance Connect
Our next step is to fully integrate the Google Gemini AI to translate the entire app. This would make it truly accessible for everyone in Houston, no matter what language they speak.
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