First Hackathon of 2023 — Live Links to Visualize Your Investments

Published in

Juice Box Monkey Designs

4 min readMar 17, 2023

This hackathon was actually not planned in the quarter, but with the combination of winter blues and knowing If I Invested.In will be neglected this year due to the focus on other new and shiny things.

The hackathon was broken into 3 different levels of items to tackle: the goal, the stretch and then the unexpected. If you know how we work, you know our list always includes way more than we can achieve. However over 2 long days with a total of 21.5 hours coding, because humans have to sleep eventually, we finished all three levels.

The Goal

Caching stock information for the day [ ✅ Completed]

Previously if you kept requesting the same timeframe it would rerun the whole process again and again, not very efficient. Stock information was already cached but now requests are too.

Live Link Support [ ✅ Completed ]

This has been an ask since the beginning and we have finally launched it. The theory is that if you invested X on someday, you shouldn’t have to refill all the information again on a new request. You should be able to save a link with all the information and every time you view the link it will pull and update the data to show you up-to-date visualization of your investments. You can copy the link from the new Toolbar (which was part of the stretch for this hackathon)

No account is required either!

Check some Live Links out yourself:

If you invested 10 stocks in Microsoft at the beginning of 2022

If you invested 100 stocks in Gamestop before the pop in Jan 2021

If you invested 1 stock in Meta (Facebook) before the 2019 pandemic

The Stretch

Live Links in Recent Requests — easy click-throughs [ ✅ Completed ]

Previously the Recent Requests section was not interactive, but with the new update, you can quickly click through and view Recent Requests like the person who originally made them. (Without knowing who did, because no accounts)

When you click on the new section at the bottom it will auto-fill all the information to visualize it yourself. It also includes additional overrides like stock splits and override pricing.

Taskbar [ ✅ Completed ]

This started as just a “Copy Link” button for Live Links but then transforms to house more options to customize the display of your investments. Allowing you to Show/Hide the costs and quantities of your investments, which was also been a request since launching. We are very excited to launch it finally!

The Unexpected

Updating Buttons and Forms [ ✅ Completed ]

Prior to this update, everything was more squished and grey. With this update, we expand form sizes, updated icon sets and button designs.

You can now even see your previous form information while filling out the new one. Just in case you couldn’t remember. As well as new secondary buttons.

New Card View [ ✅ Completed ]

Well, this was unexpected but during the second day of the hackathon, we were running out of things so we tackled this new display ability.

Inside the toolbar, you can now control the view display, which includes this new card design. The card design is great for social posts and with the additional config to turn off cost, it means you can share photos like this, without giving any details.