LifeStack

Landing page
Part of the wizard
Part of the wizard pt2
Results and comparisons screen

Inspiration

We came across a problem for new grads especially. When comparing job offers or possible job offers, it can be difficult to figure out which location or which job you should take. So we decided to create an app that would compare the various costs of lifestyles if an individual were to take one job over the other. The idea grew to include the ability to do research and include all the what-if costs in our lives.

What it does

The app takes a location and a job or salary. If a job is inputted rather than a salary, the app will lookup the median income of that job in the location entered and use that. Then a user can add any additional costs, such as pets or medical conditions. This process is repeated a second time, where a user can enter separate data. After this is done, the app takes all the costs and calculates how much left over spending money you'll have once all your costs have been taken into consideration.

By taking into consideration the cost of different lifestyles and disabilities, we draw awareness to differences in financial equity. Namely, that two people with the same salary might end up with different amounts of take-home income, depending on their circumstances or lifestyle. This prompts the user to consider the financial perspective of others.

How we built it

The app is built on React for the frontend and Express.js on the backend. The Express.js is used as our mini API layer to fetch data from the database. For styling on the components Tailwind was used. For the database, we used CockroachDB. The data was found and imported from various sources on the web.

Some of the major data sources include:

Challenges we ran into

Issues with dark mode messing with UI elements
Lack of time to deal with Typescript
Finding, normalizing, and importing data

What we learned

Express.js was a new backend library for most of us, so it took a little bit to time to get going with it. Most of us also learned how to code some Typescript, a language that while only slightly different from Javascript, can take some getting used to.

What's next for LifeStack

There are some UI flickering bugs within LifeStack that can be ironed out in order to level-up the user experience ever so slightly. Additional conditions and data is also something that has tons of room for improvement. The possibilities with unlimited data could be endless. Some ideas for additional data could be: