How Much Car

Inspiration

With the current state of car prices, it is very easy to end up getting locked into a 7 year loan that you reasonably can’t afford and that will cause massive financial headaches for you down the road. After seeing people around us make some not so good financial decisions, we decided to build a project that could help educate on general guidelines for financing a car.

What it does

Given a person's yearly income, the website calculates what the maximum monthly payment you can reasonably afford following the 20/4/10 rule for financing. The website includes an about page that explains the rule to help further guide the purchasing process

How we built it

We began by considering Node.js for the back end and HTML/CSS for the front end, until we came across the Next.js framework which was able to be used for both back end and front end and was claimed to be faster to develop, a key quality in such a time-oriented event. None of us knew Next.js (or React for that matter) but we learned as we wrote the code, pushing and pulling to GitHub to synchronize changes.

Challenges we ran into

As first time hackers and web developers, we learned what NextJS was on the first day of the hackathon, Typescript on the way to the second day of ShellHacks, and more than we could imagine throughout the event. To say we came in hot would be an understatement. We originally planned on the website listing some cars you could reasonably afford along with their pricing information, but we soon realized that it was maybe a bit past our skill level given the time constraints which we were able to get a basic version of 10 minutes before the deadline. We ended up focusing more towards the more simple pages of the website that we could reasonably finish within the allotted time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Having a functional website at all! When we sat down to start our project we spent the first 3 hours watching YouTube tutorials on Next.js and Tailwinds, with the thought that we wouldn’t have anything to show for our efforts by the end of the 36 hours definitely in the back of our minds. Instead, we managed a website that had a navigation bar that allowed access to all pages with multiple fully fledged pages made completely from scratch without use of templates

What we learned

On the technical side we learned our entire Full Stack as we went, we’ve had no prior experience developing with Next.js, React, Tailwind CSS or Typescript. Although some of the team members have prior experience with version control using Git we feel confident that we have understood the very basics on how to collaborate in a development team.

What's next for How Much Car

Like a mandala made of sand, the How Much Car team feels that it's best to let go of our ShellHacks project. Our goal was to get ANYTHING submitted by the 36 hour deadline and we did! But we really want to preserve How Much Car to look back on as we go on more hackathons together. You can expect a lot more from the How Much Car team at a hackathon near you!

Built With

• css
• github
• html
• nextjs
• typescript