Whitestone

Whitestone

Inspiration

One teammate is quite knowledgeable in finance and stocks, but the rest of the team had very little background in stocks, so our group as a whole thought it would be really nice to create something that made learning about stocks easier.

What it does

Whitestone has two main functionalities. The first is that it takes in a stock and budget, and outputs a graph of the stock price over time (based on the 100 most recent days), the linear approximation, and the number of stocks you could buy with the budget. The second is a "glossary" functionality that takes in a company name and outputs its abbreviation.

How we built it

We started with a simple react app and installed the necessary packages using npm. We then used the Alpha Vantage API to fetch stock data, which we could use to plot on a graph. The layout was done in styled components in React (essentially just CSS).

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges was just getting started on the project. This was each member's first hackathon ever, and it took a while to just learn and get the hang of basic web development and using APIs. After that, there were some repetitive tasks that went by faster.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're all proud of our contribution and growth. Each member contributed a significant amount towards the project, and we all learn a ton of new skills regarding web development.

What we learned

We learned how to create a web app using React and JavaScript syntax, how to use the Alpha Vantage API, and how to read documentation in general. We also learned and used a lot more CSS.

What's next for Whitestone

Whitestone is still far from complete. We'd like to expand on our database of company abbreviations, as well as provide more information and analytics on stocks. Another possibility is to display information about the frequency of mentions of stocks (such as on Twitter), which could help users gain more intuition about which stocks are/were popular and how that correlates with the stock price.