Current¢

Inspiration

Half of our team is international students, so we connected over the pain of having to transfer currencies between countries. At a time when a person should be focused on getting used to a new environment and better connecting, this creates a point of friction we wanted to solve.

What it does

Current¢ gives you the current exchange rate for any two currencies as well as a graph of the last month of historic rates. Our app then allows you to check whether or not the current rate is good, about average, or bad to better inform you whether you should make a transfer now or in the future. Lastly, our app allows you to also set up notifications in case you wish to know when rates improve.

How we built it

All of our code was in Python. We used the Shiny GUI framework to wrap our backend into an interactive app, and then converted the app into HTML and WebAssembly. This means that this app runs Python code without any setup, purely in the browser with no server. We did this because we wanted the app to survive even if we couldn't pay for a server, and also to make it more accessible with the only barrier being access to a web browser. Further, since WebAssembly is just compiled code, our implementation should last for however long it remains on Git Hub.

Challenges we ran into

Shiny for Python and WebAssembly conversion is extremely new, coming out only in April of 2023. This means that there is very little documentation and almost no comments online for the numerous bugs that we encountered. Further, our app actively scrapes the latest rates, but WebAssembly does not have sockets. This means that popular packages like requests are off the table.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We envisioned this app purely as a conceptual drawing with all of us having minimal experience ever making an app. Yet, we powered through to make an app that achieved almost all of the goals we originally set out to do.

What we learned

We learned a lot about Python and how it interacts with WebAssembly and GUIs as well as how complicated currency rates can be.

What's next for Current¢

We hope to add more features such as allowing the user to set their units to better understand the cost of something. For example, how many bobas would a certain amount of USD translate to.

Check out our full code on Git Hub! https://github.com/Hedonical/currentc