RainbowReturns

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Inspiration

Investing can be a complex endeavor, especially when you're seeking to support companies that resonate with your values. At Rainbow Returns, we simplify this process by emphasizing three key Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) factors. Our goal is to guide you in investing in companies whose values align seamlessly with your own, ensuring that your investments are not only financially rewarding but also personally meaningful.

What it does

Rainbow Returns connects investors with companies that align with their ethical values. First, the user defines the emphasis they believe should be placed on Gender, Sexual Orientation, and Race in regards to DE&I. Then, we find companies that match the user’s preferences by looking at our DE&I subscores for companies on the S&P 500. Once we best fit companies to the user, we provide the user with these companies along with the minimum information required to invest, a stock ticker.

How we built it

The front end was built using Svelte, Tailwind CSS for the styling components, and a combination of Javascript, Typescript, and HTML for connecting the styling components together to create a seamless UI. Flowbite’s templates were also used for specific CSS elements in our UI. The back end was implemented using the Kotlin based web framework, Ktor. Both the frontend, and the backend are also fully containerized using Docker. We chose these technologies because we were unfamiliar with them and wanted to get better with them!

Challenges we ran into

We originally wanted to use Auth0, so that users could pin favorite companies, and track companies over time, but Auth0 ended up going against the grain of our tech stack. Auth0 didn’t have official support for Ktor, though there was an official blog post on using it with Ktor. However, the blog post was actually a major version out of date, and it provided incorrect information for several things. Further, Svelte is not commonly paired with Auth0 which also made the documentation lackluster. These problems ended up costing us lots of time and effort, and therefore were entirely scrapped. I think this failure helped bring us back into the hackathon mindset though, we previously had not scoped our project well and were not using time as efficiently as possible, but after this challenge we started managing time well and setting realistic expectations so that we would be able to achieve small intermediary goals.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The user interface ended up being in our opinion fairly good especially for our first time using Tailwind CSS. We are thrilled that our application is entirely containerized because we recognize that containerization is the future of hosting. We’re also proud to have a project that functions, looks good, and demonstrates our original idea scaled down to a reasonable size for a 24 hour hackathon.

What we learned

This hackathon, we were itching to try something new, and so we tried an entirely new tech stack for us. We utilized Sveltekit and Tailwind CSS to build our frontend application. We chose to utilize Ktor and Kotlin for our backend because of the significant role JVM languages play in the world of finance. Learning these skills have allowed us to grow as developers by becoming better problem solvers. It also taught us a lot about the challenges and approaches to learning new technologies, which will be invaluable in industry.

What's next for RainbowReturns

In the future, we would like to add an authorization component that saves a user information so that users can track the stocks they are interested in over time, and they can monitor the companies they invest in, so that if there is a divergence between the investor’s and company’s morals it can be quickly split. We would also like to add more data points and questions to our system. We believe that there are many more pieces of information that could contribute to personal and corporate mission statements overlapping. One major example is including environmental impact as a new data point, which would help the citizens of the public that are pushing for a carbon free future to invest in it.