Sneaker Opportunity Cost

Find out how much money you could've made/lost had you not bought your last pair of sneakers. This api enables you to quickly compare your sneaker collection with stocks and crypto.

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Inspiration

The inspiration behind this project all began with The Sneaker Database API. A little over a year ago when looking to develop an app in the sneaker industry I realized there wasn't a readily available database that contained sneaker product data. So I developed one. When entering this hackathon I wanted to find a creative way to use the API I built for The Sneaker Database.

Since sneakers are used as an investment vehicle in my community I thought it would be cool to compare the value of a sneaker over a given time period with stocks and crypto currencies. Why? Because...

  1. Who doesn't love crypto?
  2. I wanted to find a fun way to show people in my community that it is possible to build wealth with just a few dollars.

What it does

It takes a sneaker SKU or list of SKUs and finds their retail value and release date. Using this info, it looks up a static or user supplied list of stocks/crypto currencies and finds their price based upon the sneaker release date(s). Then it calculcates how much money you could've made had you invested in the specified stocks/crypto currencies instead of purchasing the sneakers.

I also have an endpoint that reads from Airtable for those people who aren't interested in sneakers or keep their sneaker collection in Airtable.

How we built it

Technologies used:

  • Node.js
  • AWS (API Gateway, S3, Lambda)
  • Terraform
  • Airtable
  • OpenAPI 3.0

Data Sources:

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge I ran into was creating the closet feature on The Sneaker Database. It was my first time using firebase for authentication and it required more thought/updates to the user journey than I originally expected.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm proud that I was able come up with a cool idea and develop it. Technology wise, I'm proud that I was able to find a use case for working with Airtable and that I've obtained a better understanding of Postman. I am also super excited about getting a working prototype complete for the closet feature that calculates the portfolio value and opportunity cost of your entire sneaker collection.

What we learned

I got exposure to Airtable's API and learned it is built using callbacks instead promises.

This hackathon helped me to learn the following about Postman:

  • variables (environment and global)
  • enivronments
  • workspaces
  • using pre-request scripts to set variable values in the body of a request
  • create APIs using OpenAPI documentation
  • genrate collections from schemas
  • mock server creation

I learned that Firebase is a great tool for enabling auth within an application quickly. I was able to integrate social sign in within my application within minutes.

What's next for Sneaker Opportunity Cost

Next, I want to build a web application to display the opportunity cost. Once the web application is built, I want to create a prediction model for sneaker valuations. With this model, people can compare their opportunity cost prior to buying sneakers.

Ultimately, I want to expand this to more than just sneakers. I want to expand it to everyday expenses, where we can help people identify the opportunity cost of non-essential expenses.

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