HenBudget

Inspiration

Our inspiration comes from our lack of knowledge in the area of budgeting. Our team collectively shares very limited knowledge in regards to budgeting our expenses, so we thought the best way to learn would be through researching budgeting tactics and implementing a simple interface to assist with budgeting expenses.

What it does

Our program prompts the user to put in their monthly income and add their expenses to a list on the interface. Upon completion, the user clicks the 'Done' button to receive an analysis of their spendings and whether they fall in line with the expected proportions of budgeting.

How we built it

The program was built in Java using Scenebuilder to implement JavaFX as a front-end and Intellij as the IDE for the back-end. We took advantage of Intellij's 'CodeWithMe' tool to work on the same code from different devices.

Challenges we ran into

There were many moments where we were just stuck and our brains couldn't really push out any solutions when our code wasn't functioning. We would push through for as long as we could, and if we were completely lost, we would take a literal step back and walk around and then come back once we've got a better idea for an approach.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of our commitment to something we had initially disregarded as something we were incapable of completing. Our registration for the Hackathon was highly impromptu, as we came to the event with the preconception that we would be attending the workshops and other festivities the event had to offer rather than actually partaking in the coding prompts. Despite our initial conception, we worked through and produced an entire working application simply because we had the ambition to produce something we believed to be useful.

What we learned

Throughout this hackathon, we learned effective strategies for working together on a single coding project, as well as methods to restore confidence and motivation at the face of a problem. Through the rough spots of the project, we persevered and gave it our all.

What's next for HenBudget

To make HenBudget a truly serviceable application, we could add customizable margins for budgeting portions, multiple profiles for budget accounts, a date and time feature for when the project is saved, and some added UI elements to reduce the monotony of budgeting (e.g. the use of emojis next to expense types, housing could use a house emoji, medical could use a pill emoji, just simple quality of life changes that can go a long way to reduce budgeting induced stress).

Built With

• intellij-idea
• java
• scenebuilder