Finnder (Finra Challenge)

Finnder is a fun and interactive way to learn how to invest in the stock market for complete beginners.

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Finra's challenge peaked our interest with it's goal - to educate investors - and it's broadness, allowing us to be creative.

Initially, we knew we wanted to create an interactive tutorial, inspired by tryruby.org, but we wanted to make it fun and simple. Enter Tinder; this inspired our quizzes to be small flashcards with simple answers that mimic real life decisions in a given situation (Eg: Short a stock or long a stock?). In addition, we wanted to make the learning process extremely interactive, so we decided to include a stock simulation with economic news that can affect the random price paths of the simulation.

The idea was fletched out. Great. But challenges arose as soon as we started, because most of us had backgrounds that fit difference uses, with little collective experience in web app front-end frameworks. Everyone on the team knew that they would have to spend as little time learning their part to be able to hit the ground running and meet the deadline. The roles were highly fluid, and we all touched on every aspect if even slightly, which gave us a better team chemistry and understanding of each other's skills that greatly smoothed out the road.

We decided to use the Meteor.js framework for the full-stack, and chart.js for the stock simulation's data graphing.

Each one of us had to learn our own technology and process: Terence - with his intensive financial knowledge and tech background - learnt javascript, Lenmor learnt to translate Python to Javascript, then jumping into the front-end process with Meteor.js, Mugisha led the front-end development without prior experience often working on back-end systems, and Khaled took charge of UI/UX and feature design for the very first time.

We are proud of our tight teamwork and learning progress.

Finnder could, with a few revisions, become an invaluable tool for beginners who don't know how to invest and are intimidated by stock trading. We aimed to shatter the illusion that trading is exclusive to specialists.

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