Wend Finance

Wend began as a blank canvas. I designed and built the application across web and iOS around a different model for finance education: connecting money and investing to pop culture, current events, creator stories, sports, entertainment, and market conversations people already cared about.

The web app centered on a community reading experience. Users could browse ranked finance stories, filter by topics, follow source links, and discuss individual articles. Familiar social-news patterns made the product immediately legible while leaving room for Wend’s own editorial identity.

Ruby on Rails sat at the center of the stack because speed, convention, and built-in product primitives mattered more than architectural ceremony. Models, authentication, background jobs, admin workflows, and server-rendered views stayed in one maintainable application.

I built ingestion workflows that scraped articles from multiple sources, normalized their metadata, extracted summaries, and prepared each story for automated review. AI agents then judged topic fit, cultural relevance, usefulness, and discussion potential. They rejected generic pieces, classified accepted stories, and produced concise summaries for the feed.

The forum layer lived directly inside the Rails product, keeping posts, comments, rankings, topics, and sources in one model. With Hotwire Native, the same screens and product logic also powered an iOS experience without rebuilding everything in a separate native codebase.

The design balanced an approachable editorial feed with bold brand moments, topic badges, social actions, and phone-friendly navigation. It made finance feel accessible without making it feel unserious.