To Django or to Not Django

A week ago we learned that Intuit is going to shut down the convenient budgeting service Mint, which we (mostly my wife) has been using for several years. This is a bummer since it provided pretty specific budgeting tools, pulled all our banking information together into one spot, and it was free if you disregard the value of the information for Intuit. Intuit is moving the userbase to another app, CreditKarma, which appears to have some of the same tools but doesn’t get down into the nitty gritty that Mint does.

Since my wife wasn’t super interested in CreditKarma we started looking for another budgeting app that was as slick as Mint. There are some paid options, which is fine and I’m certainly not begrudging those apps from wanting to make some coin helping us to make some coin, but we weren’t thrilled. There are free and/or open-source options out there as well, but I didn’t see any that could pull information from banks directly. This meant logging into each bank account, downloading the latest info, and importing them manually into the app before you could even really get started. Not very convenient, even if more private.

So we talked about just using spreadsheets, or maybe a Google Sheet combined with a Google Form which could be used to enter transactions quickly via our phones. I’m not a huge fan of Google, and though I live with it (with Gmail mostly) I usually try to steer clear of getting further caught up in it. So I had another thought…maybe make my own little web app for this?

Creating a budgeting app obviously wouldn’t be a real solution. She wants something now. I don’t want to put financial info on the web, and I clearly don’t have the skill to even really think otherwise. Obviously this wasn’t going to connect to our financial institutions either.

No, mostly it was just enough to start thinking about persistent information in websites, aka backend stuff, which I have always sort of avoided. But I have hosting now and a few domain names, all of which are just linked to Github Pages or holding inactive Wordpress sites. Could a very simple budget app be just a good way to ‘dip my toes’ into backend development?

I started to look around and came across Django. I’m not sure now why I spent more time looking at Django than other options— I must have come across an existing open source budget app built with Django. Since looking through the docs and a handy starter tutorial I have become a bit more confident that I can at least get something working. Not for any real data, but get a little UI setup for entering info.

It is likely that any such project would pivot towards TTRPG related stuff, like character sheet tools or an easy entry system for new spells or items for “on the go”. In the past, I’ve just relied on saving that kind of info in the browser’s localStorage, which doesn’t really have any longevity to it. Getting a database to hold the info on a server, maybe even with different users…that is exciting.

Unfortunately, despite the excitement, it still takes getting off my duff and doing it. In the last week I’ve spent a lot of time on a neighborhood project that has taken a lot of time/brainpower, or working on house projects, or working on this new blog (learning Astro.js)…so I haven’t installed Django yet.

Maybe tomorrow! (only if I can resist the Baldurs Gate urge…)