GEM$ Financing Program

Four undergraduates from the University of Hawaii - Manoa and I worked together to create a web application for the GEM$ loan program, a government solar financing program with a focus on automating the application process and communication between the customers, contractors, and the Hawaiian Electric company. The application provides improvements to the current process, which is done manually and is very prone to errors. As of now, it is mainly initiated by filling out a long PDF application that has many sections and can be overwhelming to fill out. Additionally, all the information from the submitted application is also inputted manually into a spreadsheet, so the possibility of errors is much more frequent, as every piece of information is copied over by hand.

Our solution, which we are working toward, aims to eliminate the redundancies in the current process by creating a web application that is simple to fill out and easy to follow along. Applicants can create their accounts, fill out their applications, and save their progress to come back to at a later time. For the loan processors, different account roles will be created, and roles with admin privileges can look up any applicant by querying their information in the database.

If you’d like to learn more about our project, please visit our DevPost or GitHub page to obtain additional knowledge of the overview, purpose, guidance, and solution.

Contributions

My contributions to this project were to work mostly on React.js, Meteor, and MongoDB. For this project, I was able to implement the following features:

• Sending an automatic email when a user signs up for an account on our site. Additionally, admin users can click on multiple accounts to send emails to them that their applications are unfinished

• Creating forms for users and entering record fields into the database

• Displaying the table of all users with their names, emails, form-section statuses, and buttons for application approval or rejection

• Admins can quickly search by a specific name or email to find a specific application

• An E-signature that lets users sign and submit their names

Lessons Learned

What I have learned from this project is team and database management. With that, I intend to pursue a career in software development or software engineering, where I will be able to work effectively and efficiently in a team setting. Working with many teammates on this project has helped me learn how to communicate with each other clearly so we know what we are doing on certain parts of the project.

Overall, the project is greatly satisfied because we were able to improve the application compared to the original GEM$ Loan Program. Hopefully, in the future, I will continue to work on this project to expand my knowledge and creativity.

Simple-Green-Loans Links

• Repository
• Documentation
• Website (no longer active)