Week 7: Last Week in Woodlawn

Time: 03/02-03/0, 11.5 hours

Topics: A Christian Perspective on the Insurance Industry.

Tools: Laravel, GitHub.

Summary:

This week I explored more of Woodlawn and Hyde Park on my skateboard, baked sourdough loaves for the first time, and stayed up late working on mid-term assignments. Spring break would start that weekend so it was difficult to stay motivated and get everything done before I would fly to San Francisco. Little did I know this would be my last week living in Woodlawn with my new cohort friends and staff. While Wunderite was in the thick of TechStars Boston, Peter and Joe had to split up, Joe flying to Ohio, because Wunderite also joined Brokertech, a program specifically for investors and innovators building the next generation of technology solutions for insurance agencies and brokerages. Wunderite was participating in two accelerators in the same month! Brokertech put Joe in conversation with some of the top insurance agencies in the country.

Having wrapped up the blog functionality for the marketing site, Peter, Cyril, and I decided it was about time I wrote some code for the online application. This week I started where I left off watching Laracast videos to begin working with Laravel and Vue. Wunderite recently started using Jira, a project management tool that outlined sprints and various tasks. I got acquainted with project roadmaps, story-point estimates, priorities, and Wunderite’s GitHub branching guidelines.

A Christian Perspective on the Insurance Industry: Insurance helps reduce the financial uncertainty of loss in areas of life where security and safety are not guaranteed and accidents or disaster, eventually inevitable. The beauty of it is that the “many” who avoid accidents and catastrophe help the ‘few’ who do experience these. There are many types of insurance and Wunderite’s audience is insurance agents who are in charge of undertaking business insurance to protect a corporation or non-profit agency's assets. Protecting buildings, vehicles, property, and employees for a single business entity is no simple task, and Wunderite wants to make this easier. A significant percentage of a corporation's budget is spent on coverage. According to inc.com, anywhere between 20-30 percent of predicted gross sales is the baseline budget for health and life insurance. Insurance is one of the many modern advances that Dr. Hill outlines in his essay Can Money Buy Happiness? which presents mixed blessings. I believe that managing insurance responsibly is one way that we can affirm God’s providence and act in neighborly love. At its best insurance is a model that encourages the pooling of communal resources to administer financial help to those in crisis.