Moolah Diaries – Background

When I moved back to Australia about 5 years ago, I suddenly had a much more complex task of tracking our money. I was consulting, so had to set aside money to pay tax at the end of the year, we were buying our first house and having just moved countries needed to buy pretty much everything so budgeting was critical. I found a reasonable looking money tracking application and started recording all our transactions there and using it to manage our money.

That worked for a year or so but I wound up frustrated that it couldn’t produce exactly the view of data I wanted and couldn’t forecast into the future quite in the way I wanted. So I wound up writing my own because it seemed like fun and would let me play around with shiny new technologies.

I those crazy days backbone was all the rage and bootstrap was the latest must-have look so I went with those.  I also built it with the intention that it could run entirely as a standalone, offline webapp using a backbone plugin to store data in local storage. It could sync data across devices via a web server but the intention was to support going offline without any notice or loss of functionality.

I very imaginatively called my new thing “finance” because why waste time thinking of a name when there’s code to write. However, when I set up a domain to sync through StartSSL (who used to provide free, trusted SSL certs but who are no longer trusted) refused to issue a cert for a domain containing the word finance. Apparently you have to pay if you’re doing anything to do with financial transactions. I tried money and a few other variants before finally discovering that “moolah” got through the filters and so the project became known as Moolah.

As with most personal projects, it fairly quickly reached the point where it could do everything I needed, including the particular reports, graphs and views I couldn’t get from the previous software. Everything was great, and I was happy.

So I stopped changing the code.

Time moved on, no one talks about backbone anymore, bootstrap’s still doing pretty well but I never liked it much and I kept on adding all my transactions into Moolah. As the number of transactions increased, some of the underlying design decisions were challenged and all the “I’ll improve that later when I need to” things started to become needed. But it had been years since I’d worked on the code and now it was an unfamiliar, legacy code base that some imbecile had written while obviously more interested in playing with shiny new things than writing maintainable code.

Since it was designed to work offline, every transaction was sent down to the browser so it had all the information. And due to one too many annoying bugs in the backbone local storage plugin it didn’t so much sync as just download everything every time you opened the page.  The size of the data was pretty insignificant, but the number of transactions to be filtered and totalled up etc meant that eventually it just wasn’t worth trying to use on my phone, then Safari started struggling and eventually even Chrome on my very beefy dev box struggled.

I’m sure I could work through the old code, fix up a bunch of it’s poor assumptions and keep it chugging along, but this is spare-time coding and that doesn’t sound at all fun. Instead, I’m going to rebuild it from scratch using lots of shiny new technologies but without making the same mistakes as last time.

Except the one about using shiny new technologies that may or may not last. I’m totally making that mistake again because it’s just too much fun. But I will try to avoid going too crazy with it.

And since my blog is far too neglected these days, I’m going to try and write about it from time to time. We’ll see how that goes…