Heart of Gold

• 

  UI

Inspiration

Lyft's round up and donate system really inspired us here.

We wanted to find a way to benefit both users and help society. We all want to give back somehow, but don't know how sometimes or maybe we want to donate, but don't really know how much to give back or if we could afford it.

We wanted an easy way incorporated into our lives and spending habits.

This would allow us to reach a wider amount of users and utilize the power of the consumer society.

What it does

With a chrome extension like "Heart of Gold", the user gets every purchase's round up to nearest dollar (for example: purchase of $9.50 has a round up of $10, so $0.50 gets tracked as the "round up") accumulated. The user gets to choose when they want to donate and which organization gets the money.

How I built it

We built a web app/chrome extension using Javascript/JQuery, HTML/CSS. Firebase javascript sdk library helped us store the calculations of the accumulation of round up's. We make an AJAX call to the Paypal API, so it took care of payment for us.

Challenges I ran into

For all of the team, it was our first time creating a chrome app extension. For most of the team, it was our first time heavily working with javascript let alone using technologies like Firebase and the Paypal API.

Choose what technology/platform would make the most sense was tough, but the chrome extension would allow for more relevance since a lot of people make more online purchases nowadays and an extension can run in the background/seem omnivalent.

So we picked up the javascript language to start creating the extension. Lisa Lu integrated the PayPal API to handle donations and used HTML/CSS/JavaScript to create the extension pop-up. She also styled the user interface.

Firebase was also completely new to us, but we chose to use it because it didn't require us to have a two step process: a server (like Flask) + a database (like mySQL or MongoDB). It also helped that we had a mentor guide us through. We learned a lot about the Javascript language (mostly that we haven't even really scratched the surface of it), and the importance of avoiding race conditions. We also learned a lot about how to strategically structure our code system (having a background.js to run firebase database updates

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Veni, vidi, vici.

We came, we saw, we conquered.

What I learned

We all learned that there are multiple ways to create a product to solve a problem.

What's next for Heart of Gold

Heart of Gold has a lot of possibilities: partnering with companies that want to advertise to users and social good organizations, making recommendations to users on charities as well as places to shop, game-ify the experience, expanding capabilities of what a user could do with the round up money they accumulate. Before those big dreams, cleaning up the infrastructure would be very important too.

Built With

• ajax
• css
• firebase
• html
• javascript
• jquery