## Inspiration

Taking micro-loans is often a **painfully slow** and **costly process** due to administrative procedure with financial institutions and conversion fees for international loaners.

In addition, many Canadians today don't have a solid understanding about the implications of borrowing loans from banks and other financial institutions. **Concepts like debt and interest accumulation are extremely important** when managing one's finance and **its often too late** for Canadians when they understand how interest can accumulate.

## What it does

*(Not So)* Lone Shark is a peer to peer micro-loaning using bitcoin for both experimenting with interest accumulation and making passive income. Users can request loans of up to $100 CAD and can also loan money to other users, collecting interest compounded hourly after the loan is made. This offers an incentive despite loaning to strangers: the ability to generate passive income with very little risk.

The benefits of *(Not So)* Lone Shark is that its use of a decentralized currency allows for 0 conversion fees (other than a fixed ~ 5 cent transfer fee) and can be done instantly online.

In addition, whenever a user makes a request for a loan, it prompts the user with a timeline of how interest will accumulate per hour to educate the user on how interest accumulation works to gain first hand experiences with loans and time budgeting.

## How we built it

*(Not So)* Lone Shark is built using JavaScript across the stack. React powers the front-end and Meteor/Node.js handles all back-end traffic and calculations. SSL Encryption is also used to ensure that all data is secure, which is important for managing personal finance.

The project is also hosted on Meteor's Galaxy Platform for fast computation speeds and reliability.

## Challenges we ran into

Block-chain technology is quite complex; its transactions and the user’s wallets ultimately remained external to our application, and this compromises the original ideal of completeness that we sought. We had looked into different implementations of Ethereum, but it was of not much help.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

Within the timespan of 36 hours we were able to create a project that encompasses tackling advanced concepts like block-chain and micro-financing. It was an ambitious project and we take pride in being able to undertake it.

## What we learned

Meteor and React have different methodologies that lead to conflicts within implementation, as a result the implementation of our application was a rough track, and this can be avoided had we utilized BlazeJS over ReactJS.

## What's next for Not So Lone Shark

Implementing blockchain technology into the application itself, whether in the form of creating our very own cryptocurrency or utilizing another platform like ethereum/bitcoin, and completely incorporating that transaction into our program, to allow for better security in transactions.
## Lejr

**Introduction**

A web application that allows you to track how much money your friends owe you, and after your friend accepts your request of paying you back, the app will directly deposit the money into your bank account.

**How we did it**

We built the website using Interac's Public API and MongoDB hosted by MLab; the website is hosted on Heroku. Our Node.js/Express backend is also acting as a REST API for our Android application.

**Inspiration**

Our friends keep forgetting to pay us back, and we're uncomfortable with pestering them so we thought of the idea to make payment requests simple and quick by using the Interac API along with a Node.js backend.
## Inspiration

Like everyone, we love music. So we wanted to make something simple, silly, and fun. This is our group's first hackathon so we wanted to make something visual and easy to use/implement.

## What it does

LyriCount scrapes the top artists from [billboard.com](https://www.billboard.com/charts/artist-100) and grabs their lyrics from [iTunes search API](https://affiliate.itunes.apple.com/resources/documentation/itunes-store-web-service-search-api/). We compile all that information and do some really simple calculations to show the count of lyrics for artists.

## How we built it

We used some web scraping with beautiful soup, the iTunes search API, and Flask for the routing/front end. We also used matplotlib to display the data.

## Challenges we ran into

We had problems with github at first, deciding what to do for the project, and other general IT issues within the first hour or so. We also couldn't properly implement NLTK python library correctly to clean up our data but it's there for future improvement.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our group is comprised of all relatively new and inexperienced developers, only just starting programming after four months of studying. We picked up Flask just a few days ago, and barely knew anything about matplotlib, NLTK, or APIs.

## What we learned

We learned a lot about some useful Python libraries, how basic APIs work and how to use them, text processing, and using a front-end framework like Flask. We learned that setting up a dev environment properly is also important in preparation. Git is crazy useful and necessary to understand.

## What's next for LyriCount

Our project has a long way to go. Our site is not hosted/deployed, not mobile responsive, not objectively pretty to look at, does not use NLTK properly, and many other various issues. However, our team will be adding to this after nwHacks and plan to address some of these hurdles!