My Final Project - Tickr
Published: 2024-02-16 15:22:15

After 5 months of learning, practicing, and creating, my software engineering bootcamp is coming to an end. It's been a wild ride with lots and lots of bumps along the way, and I might have already gone through a mid-life crisis at 29, but I can honestly say this has been one of the best experiences of my life. 5 months ago I made the decision to step out of my comfort zone in the hopes of finding a new career path, and little did I know I would also find a new passion as well. The course material, lectures, "homework", and live coding exams were challenging and tedious at times, but the projects made it all worth it. Throughout my coding journey here at Flatiron, I created 5 projects in total. My first project was a Madlibs game created in javascript, my second project was a "tinder for stocks" made in react.js, my third project was a battleship game made in python3, and my fourth project was made using flask SQLAlchemy and react.js. For my final project, I knew I wanted to make something that is unique and user friendly, and has real world utility. So I came up with the idea to create a web app using react, python, and flask-SQLAlchemy, called "Tickr". Tickr is a mock stock trading app, that is meant to educate, entertain, and eventually earn user's trust with investing. My target audience is individuals like my fiance, who have no clue how to navigate the stock market, nor understand most of the terminology needed to invest. So, in my own words, I translated most of the core terminology into beginner-friendly definitions, explained principals of investing, and created some best practices. This educational material is presented to the user upon signup, where they can choose to go through a slide deck to learn the fundamentals, or choose to skip and jump right into mock trading. Once you begin, Tickr gives you $20,000 of fake money to invest. You'll be matched with a random stock, and presented with a double sided card. The front contains company information, such as the industry, exchange, logo, and current share price. The back contains high level metrics such as previous close, P/E ratio, a graph with the companies Simple moving average, and a modal to see recent news & sentiments. All of the information and data is provided in real time, thanks to Alpha Vantage API I used. You can then decide if you want to invest, enter the # of shares you want to buy, your total is calculated in real time, and then you place your order which updates your total balance. From there, you can go to your portfolio to see all your investments where you can see your transaction history, and each investments individual net gain/loss. You can choose to sell or buy more of the stocks in your portfolio or, if you're looking for a particular stock, you can search for the company in the search bar at the top. Everything is intended to be simple, so users can learn how to properly evaluate stocks, and what investments have been good or bad. Once a user feels confident in their investing skills, I encourage them to create a robinhood, fidelity etrade account, so they can continue their journey with investing and hopefully make some real money!