Smart Search

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Inspiration

We wanted to learn something new to expand our skillset as future software engineers, so after scrolling through the list of challenges provided by ShellHacks, we decided to enter the Schonfeld Challenge.

What it does

Our web app is a search engine that helps users find financial security IDs parsed from the given Schonfeld Securities .csv file.

How we built it

React for the front end and Node.js and Typescript for the backend.

Challenges we ran into

Our main challenge was finding a way to build the search engine itself. The algorithm was to be written in the backend folder, while the frontend only had to call on the function from the backend and input the necessary details from the search bar input that the user types in on the actual app. Another challenge was creating a function that successfully parsed through the .csv file for filtering out the necessary security_id's that would appear as suggestions/matches when the user types in the ids on the search bar. With the help of online documentation, we successfully implemented our own function and parsing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It took us a long day to figure out the parsing and searching algorithm, but we persisted and were successful.

What we learned

It was possible to write code parsed through a big .csv file in only a few lines of code using functions from the csv-parse library. Also, the search engine algorithm function traverses the parsed data in an array, and from whatever the user inputs in the search bar, we sort the matches based on similarity. We also learned how to use Docker to run the frontend and backend simultaneously without any issues.