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Overview

Duration Apr - May 2021 (6 weeks)
Role Interface Designer  •  Programmer
Focus User Experience  •  Algorithmic Sophistication
Tools Python (Matplotlib, Requests, Beautiful Soup)

Hamster Fund is a personal budgeting application where users can record and keep track of expenses, make budgeting plans, and view spend analysis through graphs and ratings based on real-world data, aiming to help users make better financial decisions and improve spending habits.

This application UI was created as my 15-112 Fundamentals of Programming & CS term project, built in Python and implemented the Matplotlib library for data visualization and the Requests and Beautiful Soup libraries for web scraping.

Main Features

The video provides a summary and demonstration of the main features in more details.

1.  User Authentication
  • Usernames and passwords are required to store and access personal data
2.  Budgeting
  • Input expenses and income by entering date, category, amount, and description
  • Allocate income to budget in different categories
  • View current savings and set monthly savings rate
  • The backtracking algorithm helps generate the optimal buying plan which helps users avoid overspending and maximize the number of higher-priority purchases
3.  Graphing
  • The Matplotlib library is used to visualize financial data for users to observe spending trends and compare between months and categories
4.  Rating
  • Generates a score of user's spending trends by comparing user's expense with the national data scraped from Federal Reserve Economic Data using the Requests and Beautiful Soup libraries.
  • Analyzes in which categories users exceed budgets and shows the results in bullet points
© site from scratch by Joanne Tsai 2022