The Goldenrod

Money doesn’t grow on trees, but you can plant the seed to grow your money! Here is our tool to manage your subscriptions and choose what matters to you.

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What it does

In line with the theme of this year’s Hack-a-thon 'planting the seed,' we have decided to take on the financial hack challenge with Capital One and created a website called ‘The Goldenrod’ to help users manage their subscriptions. The Goldenrod is a type of wildflower native to North America, symbolic of good luck and financial success.

Inspiration

We derived our inspiration from our own experiences of having trouble keeping track of our subscriptions and the associated costs, which accumulate by the month! This website, albeit in its early stages, greatly simplifies this process and transparently displays the list of subscriptions for us to see.

Challenges we ran into

During the development of this project, we faced many challenges, the greatest being the departure of three teammates due to personal reasons. Instead of succumbing to the pressure of an approaching deadline, we (Nina and Giang) proactively filled in the gaps and redistributed the workload to ensure we did not lose momentum. As neither of us had set up a database system and used Cloud service before, we also charted entirely new territory using applications such as Postman and Studio 3T.

How we built it

For the front end, we leveraged the React framework to build a dynamic and responsive user interface, implementing interactive components such as the ability to create, update, and delete entries. For the database aspect, we used MongoDB to store the data. We managed our database in the cloud using Microsoft Azure CosmoDB for MongoDB, ensuring data durability, availability, and security. We also utilized the runtime environment Node.js, and the web application framework Express.js to build a server that can handle the HTTP requests. To test our HTTP requests, we used Postman to send and receive requests and verify our API endpoints. Additionally, Studio 3T allowed us to interact directly with the MongoDB database, performing queries and efficiently managing the stored data. Finally, we successfully deployed our project on Microsoft Azure App Service, a cloud-based platform that provided a scalable and reliable hosting solution.

What we learned

Throughout this experience, we learned about the holistic process of building a website, especially the cloud service, back-end, and database aspects. It was a significantly steep learning curve for both of us, as this was not only our first hack-a-thon but also our first time attempting to build a full-stack application. We have gained invaluable skills such as teamwork, collaboration, patience, and resilience.

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