Inspiration
Originally, the idea for Money-Man came to Deyby a few weeks prior to HackNYU, as an independent personal project. Despite that, Deyby concluded that it would be cool to build out a prototype with friends for the purpose of HackNYU. The idea originated from Deyby’s problem of having to manage multiple bank accounts online and having to manually crunch numbers to calculate things like monthly expenses across all accounts. There just has to be a better way than having to bring out the calculator and spreadsheet!
What it does
Money-Man aims to simplify personal finance for its users by being a sort of hub for users, where they can track their spending across multiple accounts over a set amount of time. Through expense tracking, users will be able to see spending trends, like on what categories they’re spending the most and if their overall expenditures are increasing or decreasing. Expense tracking aside, Money-Man also aims to educate users about personal finance, as to make them better savers and spenders!
How we built it
We’re developing Money-Man using a diverse stack! Money-Man is an iOS app, where its front-end component is written in Swift and SwiftUI by our team member Arnav. Bryan, another one of our team members, led development of the backend aspect of Money-Man, which is written in Java with Spring Boot. This backend is working in conjunction with server-less micro services written in TypeScript with Vercel by Deyby. Said micro services take care of authenticating our users with their bank accounts via Plaid APIs, along with our app via Firebase Authentication. We also made use of a MongoDB database for storing basic user information, as well as basic bank information for linked accounts.
Challenges we ran into
As a team, we decided we wanted to outdo ourselves by working with technologies unfamiliar to us. With that being said, we spent a good amount of time researching documentation and examples for features we want to implement. We’re also both happy and a bit sad to say we spent a lot of time writing broken code. For instance, Arnav had trouble dealing with live JSON data on the front-end, as well as making API requests. Bryan mainly struggled with getting Spring and Firebase Authentication to work hand in hand, as well as getting our database to be properly connected. As for Deyby, he struggled with recreating Plaid API integrations specifically for interaction via Swift, as most examples found were for projects with React.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Honestly, we’re very proud of the UI Arnav was able to churn out. The UI, in our opinion, aligns well with an our pillar of simplicity. UI aside, we’re very proud of ourselves for stepping way out of comfort zone for the purpose of this project.
What we learned
We learned a lot more about a lot (literally!). Deyby usually develops React projects for the purpose of hackathons, but this was his first time mainly focusing on micro service development for integration with an iOS app. It was also one of his first few times working with MongoDB. As for Bryan, this was his first time working MongoDB and Java Spring, along with Firebase Authentication.
What's next for Money-Man
As a team, we intend to keep developing Money-Man so that we at least have an MVP of the project with some basic features, as we believe this is a nice passion project, and not to mention, a great project to feature on our resumes and personal sites! Deyby is especially passionate about this project, as one of his interests is Financial Technology, so the project is bound to remain in development in one way or another.
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