RVA Bucks

Inspiration

Our inspiration came from our interest in stimulating the economic growth and stability of communities by encouraging the retention of money in the community.

What it does

This project allows consumers to purchase RVA Bucks, a virtual currency, through a phone app or website. Consumers can use RVA Bucks at participating local businesses for discounts and rewards.

This is advantageous to the user and to local shops for a multitude of reasons. To begin with, users are incentivized to use RVAbucks because they are cheaper than US dollars. Once they purchase this RVAbucks, they are locked into spending that money with qualifying local shops, who can convert that money. This additionally can serve as a unified loyalty program for local shops without the infrastructure to offer such reward programs on their own.

How we built it

We considered a few different platforms and technologies. Our group had a wide range of experience and preferred platforms. In the end, we decided that the best mix of everyone's preferences and skills and the quickest method to get up and running in a collaborative environment would be a simple LAMP stack with plenty of custom APIs for lots of frontend logic. We built our git repo directly to production very frequently so that everyone could see their code running soon after they wrote it.

Challenges we ran into

We wanted to get the entire Capital One Verify API Auth workflow done, but we didn't make it in time. We did get partially through the workflow.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I did not think we would be able to get both a web application and mobile application up and running, but we were able to by modifying our web app. We also got the integration with Stripe completed so that users could actually buy "RVA Bucks" with a few clicks.

What we learned

We had a range of experience on our team, from beginners to experts. As beginners, we learned more about GIT and working as a team to create a real-world project. We also gained a new interest in researching more languages.

Yousef: I learned php for the first time. I learned how to connect a php backend to a web frontend. Got introduced to Bulma, a cool CSS framework. Most Importantly, I learned to collaborate and take in new ideas from my partners.