First of the year

Ignoring global events, 2016 was an interesting year for me. Personally, I manged to achieve, and more importantly learn, quite a bit: I switched jobs, started learning Scala (full time), started learning and working with machine learning, entered my first BBQ competition and my first Chilli cook-off competition. I also submitted my first proposal for a conference talk - it was not selected in the end, but I was pleased to have at least submitted it, and one of my goals for 2017 is start public speaking (conferences/meetups) so will hopefully continue to submit talk proposals in the hope that one gets selected by the end of the year.

There are probably lots of things that I had in mind to do at the start of the year that I didn't manage - such as finishing my education side project, but never mind.

The new tech stuff I have been able to learn has been a product of moving jobs, so that's cool, and I'm very happy with what we are doing there at the moment, but with the two cooking competitions I signed and paid up to enter both of them early in the year on a whim, and that provided the motivation and deadline to force me to practice, prepare and actually complete them.

2017

So here are a few goals I am aiming for in this coming year:

Machine learning - let's start with a realistic one. I want to become a lot more competent and experienced in the ML field. It's an exciting area right now, and something that is only going to get more prevalent, so I am really happy to be somewhere I can be involved in it from the start of a project and get to know it better.

Writing - A little different this time. As a goal to aim for, and also just to see the wider process I want to write a book. About meat. I have lots of ideas already, it will be relatively short but at first at least it should be an e-book whistlestop tour of hows and whys of cooking meat.

Kickstarter - I am currently working on an android app for my boy (5 years old), and it made me think about how I could make it more accessible for other kids to make their own apps. So I might kickstart it once I have made some progress. Again, mostly for the experience of running a kickstart project rather than actually expecting to get the money to do it.

Public speaking - As mentioned, I would like to get into this. So if I manage to get a proposal accepted before the end of the year, that would be cool.


On to the next one!

Managing your personal finance (a Java webapp)

"Cash Rules Everything Around Me" - Method Man

A few years ago I was fed up of how useless all the banks were at helping me understand my transactions/spending patterns with their online banking. Basically, they all just seemed to let you log on, and then see a list of transactions (often just referencing codes) of payments in and out by date. Nothing else. It seemed like there were lots of simple things missing that could make it a lot more useful, to name a few:

• Smarter tagging/categorisation - where some direct debit was just listed by the code of the recipient rather than meaningful info, or being able to group all the spending in coffee shops
• Alerting to changes/unexpected behaviour - for example when a fixed term-price contract comes to an end and the price changes - detecting a change in a regular fixed aount/recipient should be easy

So this is what I started building - a lot of the functionality has since been built into banks such as Monzo, the aim of this webapp was simply to allow you to import transaction histories (most online banks I use provide the ability to export transactions in csv) so you could view/filter/tag any existing bank data. It only supports Santander at the moment, and the alerting stuff never actually got built in, but I thought I would chuck it on Github rather than have it just sit around gathering dust in a private repo.

I have written about the project a while ago, when it was first underway, but as it has been not worked on for a while, I thought I would move it to GitHub - hence the post here today. The app and all the code can be downloaded here: https://github.com/robhinds/cream

Building & Running

Its a simple java, maven app (it was several years ago, so not migrated to Spring Boot, Gradle, Groovy etc) - and it builds a WAR file. It also uses LESS for style stuff, which is also built by maven (although watch out for silent failures if you make changes!). If you are using an eclipse based IDE you can follow the guide here: to get incremental build support for LESS building (e.g. just change the LESS source and go refresh in the browser and it will reload).

You can run the WAR file in any tomcat/IDE server, and the backend is currently expecting a MySql DB (but can easily be switched for a differed DB driver if required)

Roadmap

• Migrate to Spring Boot, Groovy, Gradle
• Add further bank transaction importers
• Add alerting framework

Screenshots

(I loaded in a generated transaction history - which is why some of the charts look a little weird)