Portfolio Royale

Login page with functional registration

Inspiration

Our group had somewhat ambitious goals, and one of them included exploring an area of computer science that we hadn’t really explored before. Creating a web application solely using cloud based infrastructure became a challenge which our group wanted to tackle to learn more about AWS, it’s application in a practical sense and how it may be used to help us in the future, personally as well as in the industry.

What it does

Portfolio Royale allows friends to battle against each other within the trading space, giving fake money for the users to spend on stocks that are updated based on the current market. It shows your transaction history, your stocks owned, the option to buy and sell stocks after checking their current price and a leaderboard, showing how your profits are stacking up against other users.

How we built it

Portfolio Royale is a web based application, built on AWS EC2, using node.js for building the backend web server, mySQL for the database and React for the frontend. As we were new to this, it took countless hours of trial and error, but using our previous experience we put together the application so that it has login & authentication and stock prices which update with real-time.

Challenges we ran into

It was a first time for all of us doing such a CLI heavy project, and it was a first time for some of us making such a JavaScript heavy project. Because of this we ran into many roadblocks, with the conventional method we know not being the best method, or the right way to do it. An example of this is our trouble with databases - originally we tried to use postgreSQL but it wasn’t as straight forward as we first thought. Because of this and some network issues we completely lost track of where our progress with the database was at, and our limited CLI experience held us back in the troubleshooting for it. In turn we decided to start again, this time using mySQL which went a lot smoother. There were other similar roadblocks, but we persevered and managed a satisfactory demo.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Ultimately we’re proud of managing to follow through with this project till the end. There were a few times where we didn’t see a proper route forward, or felt like we were swinging blind, but even still, with our combined efforts, a little bit of luck and a lot of redundant files and scripts, we managed to combine it all together, in a way which resembled our vision. Throughout this project every one of us has learned a huge amount, and are ultimately more confident going forward into the cloud space.

What we learned

Again, as it was our first time undertaking a project like this, we had to cross huge hurdles - many of which were knowledge-gated. In turn, we learned a huge amount about setting up a server environment through CLI with Node.js, and deploying the project on said server to a domain.

What's next for Portfolio Royale

I believe Portfolio Royale has huge potential, for further polishing aswell as functionality. If we were to further produce this, we would add more graphics and focus further on the social system - aswell as a leaderboard, we would have chats and the option to do private competitions with friends. Since it’s produced with an AWS server, it shouldn’t take much to produce it as an official product.