20 May 2012
After writing last blog post I started to build out another app using Dokuen and the pain really got to me. I've addressed the caveats that I listed at the bottom of that article and I think Dokuen is ready for tryouts. I wouldn't put anything mission critical on it, but that's not really what it's for anyway.
Tagged: Heroku Projects Dokuen
Read More17 May 2012
Dokuen (Japanese for "solo performance") is an amalgamation of open source components that I mashed together so I could run Heroku-style services on my shiny new Mac mini while retaining the paradigm of git push deployments and environment variables for configuration. Effectively, I wanted to be able to seamlessly deploy 12 factor applications in my local environment.
Update: I've rewritten Dokuen and released it as a gem. See this article for details.
Update 2: I've added linux support.
Read More1 January 2012
Note: you can find much more information about ledger on ledger-cli.org, including links to official documentation and other implementations
For the last five years I've kept my personal finances in order using the ledger system, a sophisticated command line program that consumes a lightly formatted text file. It's helped me repay debts and get everything in order, helping me financially absorb an injury last month that would have been extremely detrimental just a few years prior.
The stock ledger program is exclusively command-line oriented. For quick checks and greping over output, this is fine. For some time, though, I've wanted a more graphical, more robust way of looking at my finances. I've also wanted a more familiar query language, since version 2.0's queries were someone limited and version 3.0's query syntax is not very well documented yet. Last year I wrote a simple system that pushed monthly reports out to static HTML files, which got me part of the way there but I really wanted something more flexible. Something where I can just write an arbitrary query and have the output dumped to HTML.
Thus, I present Ledger Web. In Ledger Web, your ledger is kept in a text file, just the same as always, reports are ERB files, and queries are SQL. Ledger Web watches your ledger file and whenever it changes dumps it into a PostgreSQL database table. It's also quite customizable, letting you set hooks both before and after row insertion and before and after ledger file load.
Tagged: Personal Finance Ledger Projects Ruby
Read More30 November 2011
Literally ten minutes after hitting the publish button on my last post I took a little tumble and broke a rather important bone in my back, and now I'm on medical leave from work for awhile.
That doesn't stop me from doing fun things, though, so this morning I cooked up a tiny webapp using [Sinatra][], [DataMapper][], and [Bootstrap][] that will help me keep track of when I take painkillers. It's called [Painkiller Jane][] after the comic book character.
Tagged: Projects
Read More27 November 2011
I started a small product a few weeks ago called FivePad, a simple easy way to organize your apartment search. It's basically the big apartment search spreadsheet that you and me and everyone we know has made at least three times, except FivePad is way smarter.
The initial versions of FivePad did everything in the web request cycle, including sending email and pulling down web pages. The other day I was about to add my third in-cycle process when I threw up my arms in disgust. The time had come to integrate resque, a great little redis based job queueing system. Except if I ran it the way Heroku makes things easy my costs would get a little bit out of control for a project that isn't making much money yet.
Tagged: Heroku FivePad Projects
Read More17 November 2011
For over two years I've been ruminating on an idea for a webapp that would help people coordinate apartment searches amongst roommates. Finding a place is pretty tough, and finding the right place for you and one or more other people is even harder. Emails, phone calls, spreadsheets, links, bookmarks. It's a mess. So, I built FivePad. More details after the fold.
Read More19 October 2011
I want to brainstorm everything that sucks about searching for an apartment. Why is it always so painful? Does it have to suck so much? I have some ideas but I haven't done this in almost a year so the pain, it is not so fresh.
Read More4 September 2011
For the past few weeks I've been working on a little product that I'm calling remindlyo, which I'm hoping to turn into a secondary income stream. The basic idea is that you put events about the important people in your life, like birthdays, anniversaries, or what have you, into remindlyo. On the day of the event, remindlyo calls you to remind you and connects you to them, all on the same phone call. You can read more about it on the main remindlyo site. In this post I want to talk more about the why instead of the what.
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