In my country (Malaysia), most banks only export bank and credit card statements as PDFs, with no standard format for displaying the data. Since most of my transactions are cashless, I want a way to track my spending habits. I don't want to manually key in each transaction, so apps that require that won’t work for me.
Right now, I'm building a bank statement PDF converter to track my past spending. I’m about halfway there, with a semi-automated way to categorize transactions too. So far, it’s working great!
For individual transactions, it's not really reliable, unfortunately. But for monthly reporting, they do have it, so that could be the next step. There's an app here that does something similar, but it doesn’t seem to be actively developed anymore. It’s a free app, so I guess there’s no reason for them to keep investing in it. Fair enough. Looks like they’re shifting toward a B2B solution instead, so that might be my next direction too.
That said, my main goal for now is just to make it work for personal B2C use first. I do think there’s some potential here because major cities are pretty much cashless now, and there aren’t any good existing solutions for B2C.
There are some other decent options, but they mainly focus on B2B (that’s where the money is), so they’re quite expensive and overkill for what I need.
You're correct. You need a server, so Vercel approach with serverless are not applicable here. As for the hosting, any VPS should be fine. I host mine on Digital Ocean. You can use Kamal to setup for database too. Or if it's simple enough, sqlite is great.
On Rails homepage, it says from “Hello World” to IPO. The idea is that Rails should help you maintain a lean stack by default. You can stick with Postgres for pretty much everything: caching, background jobs, search, WebSockets, you name it.
But, as your app grows, you can swap things out. Redis or Elasticsearch are solid choices if you need them. DHH mentioned that as well, at scale, everyone does things differently anyway. But you do have the option to keep it simple, by default.
For me personally, Rails 8 is great. My new project only need Postgres and that's it. I don't need Redis, multiple gems for background jobs or cache anymore. Able to avoid the chaotic JS ecosystem for frontend. Hopefully it will be easy to setup Hotwire Native too. It really streamlined things, and letting me focus on building features instead.
That said, for my production apps in existing companies, I’m sticking with what’s already working: Sidekiq, Redis, Elasticsearch. If it ain’t broke, why fix it? Will probably revisit this decision again in the future. Too early to tell for now.
Regarding Hotwire Native: I tried Strada a few months ago, but I never got it to work. Hotwire Native was running within 10 minutes on each platform. The docs are miles ahead of the Strada docs imo.
I just started coding in Go professionally over a year now. So far, that's the pattern that I'm seeing as well. I'm not really a fan. Some common answers on why to not use a lib is because it's trivial to rollout your own.
I like Go as a language but not so much on the community because of the reasons above. I just don't want to implement cache/cron for the n-th time again. I'd rather spending more time on building a new product instead, which is not the case when I'm using Go.
Right now, I'm building a bank statement PDF converter to track my past spending. I’m about halfway there, with a semi-automated way to categorize transactions too. So far, it’s working great!