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The Buckblog

assorted ramblings by Jamis Buck

BucketWise v1.0.0

20 April 2009 — 1-minute read

BucketWise is now available! It’s far from “done”, but I’m labelling it “1.0.0” because giving code pre-1.0 version numbers is a coward’s game. (ha!)

At any rate, fork it on GitHub, see what you think, and contribute back if you feel so inclined. The TODO includes a list of unresolved issues and features I’d like to see land someday: knock yourselves out. :)

Note that I’ve tried to document the REST API for BucketWise, too; the first draft is in doc/API.rdoc let me know if any of that is too confusing or not informative enough (I’m sure that will be the case). I’m really looking forward to seeing what people use the API for.

Note that while the source code is now available, I’m only actually hosting the application itself for myself and a few close friends. But please feel free to deploy it to your own servers, or even just run it locally. And let me know what you think! BucketWise is super opinionated, so I’m sure I’ll get some hate mail, but that’s the name of the game when you’re playing things like this on the Internet. For me, personally, BucketWise has already proved more than worth the time I’ve invested in it so far; hopefully it’ll prove useful to others as well.

Enjoy!

Reader Comments

Sweet man, I look forward to checkout it out!

This looks very interesting. Thanks for releasing it. Will download now and give it a whirl !

Great stuff, I’m going to install this tonight!

Awesome news Jamis! Congratulations!

Awesome stuff Jamis. I appreciate you making your code available to the public. Thank you.

thanks Jamis. forked and started playing around with charts :)

Thank you for releasing this. I’ve forked it and will give it a run through this weekend.

Jamis,

I’ve been searching the web for a copy of your original dungeon generator source code that you released into the public domain. Unfortunately all of the links I can find go to old ‘arrg’ site that is dead.

Do you have a current link for your dungeon generator code?

Much thanks,

John

Jamis,

I already sent you a couple of messages, but I managed to find a copy of your dungeon generator on your github site.

Unfortunately the code won’t compile as you have uploaded it. It is missing a header file ‘gameutil.h’ which defines a number of datastructures and helper routines.

Do you know where ‘gameutil.h’ is?

Much thanks again,

John

@John, please see the README that is bundled with the code. It indicates all the dependencies (including, in this case, dnd-util, http://github.com/jamis/dnd-util/tree/master).

This is great. I’ve started using it. One question: what do you do with the cash money drawn from the bank account into your wallet? How do you track it?

@Rian, easy answer: I don’t. But you could, if you wanted. Just set up a new account (called “Cash”), and when you withdraw money from your bank account, treat it as a transfer from your bank to your cash account. Then, keep track of your receipts and record your cash expenses against that account.

I don’t use cash enough to warrant the extra effort, though. Typically, I just have a “cash” bucket to indicate when I’ve done a cash withdrawal, and simply budget so much per paycheck for cash expenses.

Hey Jamis,

This is great, I’m going to play around with it, I created something with similar ideas a while ago and released it only as an iPhone web app. I didn’t put a lot into it, maybe I’ll use yours to fix it up.

Thanks!

-Chris

Hey Jamis,

great work man. I just watched one of your videos showing the app, and I think it has a pretty nice user interface.

The only beef I got against this kind of app, is that it suffers the same problem as all other financial software I’ve seen: it is disconnected from the source of information (ie transactions made by the bank) which forces your users to manually punch this in. The pattern that I’ve seen (both from myself and other people I know) is that a user will happily put up with this for about two months, and then abandon the idea (after realizing that to properly track all expenses, requires typing all 200 purchases made last month… too much time and effort).

I don’t mean to discourage you in anyway, but if you can find a way to allow your users to import this information into your app (as opposed to typing it in), you’ll get people to use the product on a permanent basis… just a suggestion.

@J, thanks! To be honest, I’m not writing this for people who can’t be bothered to hand-enter their expenses. I’ve been putting up with it nicely for two months now, and am still going strong. There are plenty of apps out there that allow you to import directly from your bank account; I’m not out to compete with them.

Frankly, I prefer hand entering the expenses. It lets you (firstly) review what you’ve been spending your money on, and (secondly) categorize it appropriately. If you just import the expenses from the bank, you’re trusting your bank to get it right, and you’re missing out on a great opportunity to double check your spending habits.