Broker Buddy

Broker Buddy lets novice and experienced investors practice the stock market without risking real money — a simulator, not a live trading platform, built around a simple idea: skills come from practice, and practice shouldn't cost you your savings. It was built from scratch in a few intense days for the New Year 2024 hackathon, alongside five other developers, and took 1st Place, Exceptional Award in a UK & Ireland -wide competition.

What it does

• A landing page introducing the platform and its risk-free simulator
• User accounts, so trades and a personal watchlist persist between visits
• A market view with live stock data, prices and daily change
• A personal wallet tracking account balance, stock balance and capital development over time
• Buy/sell actions per stock, with holdings and share counts tracked per user
• A fully responsive layout, from desktop down to mobile, with a dedicated mobile nav

Working as a team of six

This was my first experience shipping software inside a real Agile team rather than solo. Six of us — Sandra, Kim, Vernell, Darren, Katerina and me — split the platform into ownable pieces (accounts, markets, wallet, marketing pages) and worked them in parallel against a single shared Django codebase, merging continuously rather than integrating everything at the end. With a hackathon deadline and six people committing to the same repository, keeping scope realistic, communicating blockers early, and reviewing each other's code before merging mattered as much as the code itself. That's the muscle I took away from it: building software is a team sport, and the fastest team isn't the one that codes fastest alone, it's the one that stays unblocked.

The wallet and market dashboard, designed responsively across desktop, tablet and mobile.

Built with

Django and Python on the backend, with Bootstrap, HTML and JavaScript on the front end, Font Awesome for icons and Google Fonts for typography. Deployed on Heroku, with Git and GitHub coordinating six people working against the same codebase at once.