Inspiration
A few months ago while attending the SWE conference, we attended a financial budgeting seminar intended to make young women entering the professional workforce learn how to take care of their finances. During the seminar the presenters discussed how difficult it was for them to get the help they needed or how difficult it was to ask for help when it came to fiscal responsibility. A lot of the women agreed that asking for help about money and budgeting seemed to be a topic people avoided and often women felt afraid to ask for help. To us, this seemed to be an important topic because we noticed that so many women who were working high paying engineering jobs were not provided with the information needed to keep their finances in order for the present and the future. Often, women don't let themselves think far enough about their successes so we wanted to create a platform that elevated their confidence starting from the bottom with their income all the way into the planning of their financial future including any future dependents and retirements. We also wanted to create this website so that any future cases of financial abuse can be limited. The more women learn about finances and investment the more that the chances of being fiscally isolated lowers, allowing more and more women to leave abusive relationships. Women deserve to have the same level of comfort when discussing financial security and any salary negotiations so our mission is to make sure we Invest in Her.
What it does
Our website has an ask for help message system so that other women are able to respond to specific questions about finances. We have also included multiple information links through our website about salary negotiations, investment strategies, retirement plans so women can peruse without fear.
How we built it
While coding in html, we used the Visual Studio Code platform in order to create our website. We also used .JSON in order to integrate APIs and datasets into our website.
Challenges we ran into
As beginners, we ran into quite a few hurdles. Our first issue was at the beginning as we had no idea where to begin in terms of what to build and where to start. Once we got started however, we also had issues with our connection between HTML and .JSON through our platform, VS Code. Debugging on our website was challenging especially because we had no idea where to begin having never done it on VS code. We also had a few challenges with the CSS files. Our pictures and formatting weren't loading.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are very proud of the amount we got done in such a short period of time. Our expectations were very low coming into this Hackathon because we both had limited coding/hacking experience since we both are not CS majors. However, we persevered and used the tools we had available to us. We reached out for help as we needed in the form of videos, books and even people willing to teach us concepts like .JSON which we needed for our website to work. We are proud of our willingness to take on the task head on and not backing down just because of limited knowledge.
What we learned
During this project we learnt a lot about what we are capable of as well as a sizable chunk of hacking and coding languages and techniques. We learnt about the use of .JSON files and its importance in being able to read and transmit data between different languages. We also learnt more about creating websites in VS code and how html creates a skeletal frame for work to be built upon. But most importantly, we learnt that even though the task was daunting and honestly quite intimidating by asking for help and making the effort to learn something new, our skillset vastly improved and our motivation for learning skyrocketed.
What's next for Invest In Her
Invest In Her is a platform that needs to be grown, spread and shared. We want to expand the resources available to women everywhere, but especially in engineering. Mentoring services, 24/7 chat bot help, private messaging, and rotating affirmations on the homepage are some of the ideas we have to increase our impact on women and making sure that anyone who is curious about financial freedom gets the help they need. We also want to improve our user interface to make sure the experience of gaining information is also more pleasant.
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