One of the things I miss most about the Amiga workbench is variable size icons.
I love them, and miss them
That giant battletech icon before you play that fantastic turn based hexagonal game, or the Amos basic icon, there was just so much opportunity for fun.
Ever since then I occasionally try and make it happen on vanilla OS’s, without success.
Them I just realised I’ve been a dev forever, and various desktop environments on Linux have been open forever, it might be time for me to try one last time. It may never take off, but I would love to see it :D
Thank you for writing and sharing that. It's one of the simplest and sane explanations I've seen. How did discussions go with accountants separating the debits/credits into being a presentation issue?
Well, they didn’t like it! :) I considered just providing views onto the tables that would present the data in the way that made the accountants happy. But in the end we just ended up changing to using separate debit/credit columns. They managed to talk me around somehow, but I don’t remember the details any more. I think this was the relevant issue:
Accounts (in the accounting sense) are unitless, and refer to whatever meaning we ascribe to them, so we can transfer value from $ to shares, or USD to GBP or whatever.
Lalit describes this I think really well in his article
I guess it depends on the complexity of ones personal finances? The author had multiple currencies, investments, and who knows what else.
I ran a small business for a while, and I would draw a parallel to that. Once a family's finances hits the complexities of a small business, multiple assets, loans, cars, long term savings, investments, I'd say the granularity is worth it. I would certainly like to try it out.
I tick all the boxes you listed after having worked in a handful of different countries, but personally I don't really see the value add. My bank shows an overview in my main currency of choice and so do brokerage accounts. Perhaps to turn the question around, what value do you get out of it for personal finances? I wouldn't really compare to a business too closely since understanding all of your input costs down to a fine level is much more important there, at least in my opinion. The price of flour doesn't matter too much to the cent when you buy a bag every now and then, but it matters a lot when you're buying in tons.
I used to use an application in France which automatically sorted all my expenses - it sadly doesn't work as well anymore.
I have to say seeing some macro-budget category summed on a year and seeing how much of my money they consume was quite useful just to recalibrate. It wasn't life changing but it triggered things like: am I really ok spending that much on restaurants?
I must have read half a dozen intro-to-accounting books, and it never ever clicked for me. I understood the concepts, the benefits, but it just felt 'wrong'.
It wasn't wrong of course, there is so much history, ingenuity and the invention of double entry accounting, but I just couldn't get my brain to understand it.
The way the concepts settled in my head was: double entry accounting is just an excellent way of modelling a graph with nodes and edges. Accounts are nodes, transfers are edges. Every edge has a source and a destination.
For a paper ledger, each column is graph node, and each row is a graph edge.
That was enough for me to be able to learn the rest of the things I needed for interacting with the accounting world.
But I also realised that that description really only helps a very small part of the population. :D It makes things so much worse for most people.
"Hey could you help me understanding this accounting thing?"
"Sure, but first thing is, let's learn graph theory! You know who Dijkstra right?"
Whole buckets of nope.
But thats a digression from your actual question - whats the point?
It presents a rigid set of rules of recording transfers, everything has to have a from account and to account (i.e. a graph edge), every row must add up to zero.
Because of that, it makes it easy to spot any mistakes in data entry. If any of your rows dont add up to zero - then you've made a mistake.
I really enjoyed reading this, and it is inspirational as it is something I have wanted to do for a long time. And as a software developer, it really appeals to me.
How do you think it compares time-wise to using existing accounting software? Was the time investment worth it to get the control and visibility you now have?
> How do you think it compares time-wise to using existing accounting software?
Author here. I tried various consumer budgeting apps before I ended up building my own (and then going to Beancount). The main problem with every one of the apps I tried is that they don't handle investments well. 99% of my money is invested and having net worth figures which are wildly wrong because the app is only tracking bank accounts really annoyed me. That was the reason I built my own thing in the first place.
> Was the time investment worth it to get the control and visibility you now have?
Absolutely yes. I think it helps me really understand where my money is going, how I can make it work harder etc. Even though the RE part of FIRE doesn't appeal to me, the FI part does and knowing where I stand at all times has been very motivating.
Thank you for taking the time to reply - thank you!
I have question on a more personal front - please feel no obligation to reply.
What impact has having such clear visibility into your accounts had on your relationship with your wife? It feels like it would be a great catalyst for communication, trust and building things if shared finances was a key part of the relationship.
I think this part was the most inspirational - it takes a lot of courage to be that open about finances, even with partners, perhaps especially with partners.
> What impact has having such clear visibility into your accounts had on your relationship with your wife?
That's a great question. Thankfully when it comes to finances we are very aligned in our habits and goals. So we find it very natural to be open because we know that we're both going to be aligned.
Where we differ heavily though is how much we are willing to really getting onto the nitty gritty details. She really likes knowing how our money works but she also has no interest in spending so much time and effort on it.
But that works great because I love this stuff. So every month or so we have a "finances session" where I sit down with her, take her through the books and make sure we're both happy with everything.
Obviously this very much depends on the couple whether this works but it has for us so far!
Would you consider a follow up blog post about how you structure and approach your monthly finance sessions? I understand that it would be well outside of your topics of software engineering, performance and open-source, but I find that the human component of our industry is often missing. An insight into how someone has successfully navigated that would be a wonderful read.
Given the comments on this post and the other Beancount one in the frontpage, I definitely think there's enough I want to say for at least one if not two followups. Stay tuned!
I'm talking about apps similar to Mint and YNAB. Specifically I used to use an app called Yolt (which was shut down) and then was on an app called Emma for a bit.
I'm sure GnuCash would also work just fine but ultimately it's also a full double entry system. I never tried it because I came across ledger/hledger/beancount first and, being command line tools, they appealed more to my sensibilities.
i had a read through but I couldn't figure this out: What does it improve on compared to jsut regularly doing a git pull and git push to a different origin?
Also, can the destination be something other than GitLab?
Goal is to do a full mirror repo to repo incl. all branches in an automated way. It's indeed nothing else than a git pull, git push but automated (with API key). Yes the destination can be different but a provider needs to be developed for that (currently only GitLab & GitHub supported). Developed this to have a full local mirror of all my GitHub projects; but it can also work the opposite way; where you have a local GitLab you want to mirror to GitHub.
That is a really interesting investigation, but I am curious - how did the author go about evaluating whether or not was following a process? How did they measure success / failure ?
But a fascinating experiment and something I’ll try with Codex
I love them, and miss them
That giant battletech icon before you play that fantastic turn based hexagonal game, or the Amos basic icon, there was just so much opportunity for fun.
Ever since then I occasionally try and make it happen on vanilla OS’s, without success.
Them I just realised I’ve been a dev forever, and various desktop environments on Linux have been open forever, it might be time for me to try one last time. It may never take off, but I would love to see it :D
https://www.sarna.net/news/mechcombat-from-ralph-h-reed/amp/
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