Description as a Tweet:

Hedge-Hog is a new way to invest. By using crowd-sourced information, users can view investments made by their peers, allowing people from non-traditional trading backgrounds to get their foot into the stock market.

Inspiration:

I've recently gotten into dabbling in some stocks, and one of the frustrating things is not knowing the sentiment of the market at that moment. There's no current way to satisfy our desire for more knowledge about what's going on.

What it does:

If you hop onto hedge-hog.tech, the project can display the current price of Amazon, and then allow a user to "buy" the stock by entering in the number.

How we built it:

Using Laravel, Bootstrap, and The Finnhub API

Technologies we used:

• HTML/CSS
• Javascript
• PHP
• Laravel
• SQL

Challenges we ran into:

We had really big vision in what could be accomplished in 48 hours, but unfortunately we had to pivot multiple times. Originally, the product was supposed to be a react-native app, a platform that neither of us had ever built on, and it was supposed to use AWS Amplify in order to host the backend of the app (we also had no experience with cloud services either). Our biggest issue we faced during this stage was the fact that we didn't know whether an issue came from how we setup React Native, or the configuration of AWS. After multiple attempts of getting lambdas to work, we ditched the mobile and cloud view for a simple website. Unfortunately, setting up the webserver was a bit of a pain with Apache permissions, and we couldn't get laravel to migrate the databases to create users and save data. Ultimately we focused on the core component of purchasing, and then trying to create the structure of messages.

Accomplishments we're proud of:

We're incredibly proud of the fact that we're here, and didn't give up even though things didn't turn out the way we wanted. The fact that you can actually type in hedge-hog.tech and be brought to a fully-functioning page is incredibly exciting, and shows that with a little bit more experience we could have continued to work on this project.

What we've learned:

While our final project doesn't use React Native or AWS, we learned a lot about AWS architecture, and gained an understanding of the magical "cloud." Specifically, we learned how AWS amplify is a catch-all CI/CD tool that can dynamically provide a source for your frontend, while also hosting scalable backend functions through lambda. More abstractly, there's no such thing as a "quickstart," that's just based on your experience to recognize issues and tackle them quickly, making them low-cost and easy to do. As beginners, even a quickstart template can have holes that mean you don't understand the underlying technology.

What's next:

Continuing to build a functional Minimum Viable Product that could actually be used as another source of investing information.

Built with:

VIM, VScode, OVH VPS, Bootstrap

Prizes we're going for:

• Best Finance Hack
• Best Documentation
• Best Venture Pitch
• Best Web Hack
• Best Domain Name
• Best Beginner Web Hack

Maaz Shahzad
Hamza Shahzad

Table TBD