Inspiration
These days, when one is looking to invest into the real estate market, there are often many metrics one must calculate in order to know if a given purchase is a sensible financial decision. Especially for millennials and those new to the housing market, this can often involve a great deal of extra effort, and so we sought to simplify this process in the browser itself.
What it does
Invy is a Google Chrome extension written in JavaScript. When the extension is clicked on, it will display a tableview showing data from an array that has the calculated values of each metric that is predefined. This way, the user can simply look at this extension and get all insights about a property.
How we built it
We used JavaScript and the Chrome extension documentation to code this project. To enhance the user interface, we used CSS so that the data can be presented neatly and in an appealing manner.
Challenges we ran into
Having no prior JavaScript experience, we had to learn most factors of extension programming from scratch using the Google Chrome documentation. During this process, there were various problems we encountered since we were new to the language. For example, we were not initially aware of how to debut JavaScript code in an efficient manner, and this was causing several errors which prevented the application from even running on Chrome. With the help of several mentors however, we were able to learn a great amount of information not only on coding, but about proper coding etiquette and hygiene.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Despite not being able to implement features we had initially tried to include such as Firebase integration for database storage, we are very proud that we were able to create a feasible product that can access the elements of a webpage and return them in a parsed format to generate creative insights. We feel that we were able to make a great amount of progress with our low level of prior knowledge regarding Chrome extensions, ad we hope to keep learning and improve this extension over time.
What we learned
Over the course of this weekend, we learned how to use Google Chrome developer tools, create and code functional JavaScript files from scratch, connect these files using JSON, as well as enhance the UI using CSS.
What's next for Invy
In the future, we hope to create a large database to aid this extension and possibly create a landing page for the extension as well, where users can create accounts and store specific data for properties that they can look back on in the future.
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