MTGDrop

Inspiration

Jay wants to track the prices on certain cards to know when to buy, and we wanted to try our hand in making a financial tool.

What it does

MTGDrop tracks prices on cards and sends you an email when the price drops or rises to your threshold.

How we built it

We built a backend server in Go, as Drew was the most familiar with it. The server takes care of communicating with the database, sending email alerts, and pulling new pricing data. The frontend is built using Vue.js, which made it easy to get a web app up and running quickly. MongoDB is a great database for storing simple JSON objects, so it fit perfectly here.

Challenges we ran into

• Finding a working API
• Security with API keys
• Getting Docker working nicely with AWS EC2

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Building a financial tool in less than 16 hours
• Learning Go and Vue.js

What we learned

• More preparation goes a long way
  • API keys are not always "instantly" available to developers
• Taking time before the hackathon to figure out what to make can help getting into coding quicker

What's next for MTGDrop

We want to improve our email system so that it can track when previous emails are sent so duplicate alerts are not sent out. We also want to add more functionality to the web app by adding a dashboard with all of your tracked cards as well as more options for which kinds of cards to track.

Built With

• golang
• mongodb
• vue