Hiya! Feels a little silly posting my weekly notes less than a week since the last one, but I've got to get back on schedule somehow.
Back to more of the old format, I think. I don't have so many things to talk about. Here we go:
Trawler?
I briefly mentioned that I was working on an outliner written with Rust in my notes last week, and I finally got it pushed up:
So, why the question mark?
It's because I've been chatting with about the direction to take it, so the name is temporary. I chose it initially because to me it evokes heavy machinery, and I do love a fishing analog.
As you can see, it's mostly just OpenSpec + Fable output for the moment—but I'm excited to open it up to contributions from others. I'm not very experienced in running projects that support open contributions (sorry !), but I'm hoping to fix that!
My gut tells me that I need to do some vision work to guide incoming contributions. I worry about opening the floodgates to a free-for-all of LLM contributions, without a unifying vision for what the application should do. Anybody can fundamentally change a feature at any time, so some direction is probably in order.
Quantum!
I'm super excited about this one.
Quantum is a self-hosted personal finance ledger. It relies on SimpleFIN Bridge, the same service that powers Actual.
I've searched for good budgeting applications for a while now. Monarch and Copilot were pretty good, but holy cow are they expensive. All that my household needs is transaction history, income/expense diffing, and transaction categorization. I'm not interested in envelope/YNAB-style budgeting—not yet, at least.
Quantum is only those listed features so far. It also addresses a weird bug that Monarch was unwilling to fix: My bank only syncs the last week of transactions over the bridge, so Quantum stores them locally instead of relying solely on the bridge. I'm certain this will have reconciliation issues down the line, but at least I can fix them myself when I run into them 🤷🏼
If you're interested in running Quantum for yourself, I'll open-source it soon. It's built with my usual tools, Claude and OpenSpec. 100% SvelteKit on Deno. Using atproto login, of course.
Here's a screenshot with some demo data:
New kitchen faucet!
This one is pretty self-explanatory. I installed a new faucet for the first time, and the whole process was much easier than I imagined. I was prepared for the worst.
There's something enjoyable about work like this—disclaimer that I haven't introspected this thought very far. Soon after we moved into our new house, I fixed our dishwasher by disassembling it, installing a part I bought off Amazon, then reinstalling it. Replacing our faucet only involved disconnecting a couple hoses and unscrewing a nut.
Both projects were similarly simple, yet gratifying. I suppose I enjoy enacting change that measurably affects our daily lives. You can see that in Quantum as well.
I'd share a photo, but it's right at a window. You should check it out when Morgan gets around to recording a video featuring it.
These notes were refreshing to write. Hopefully I'll have some more exciting developments next time.
Until then, thank you for reading this far, and I hope you have an excellent week!