2021 - Michael Bianco

Learning TypeScript by Migrating Mint Transactions

Years ago, I built a chrome extension to import transactions into Mint. Mint hasn’t been updated in nearly a decade at this point, and once it stopped connecting to my bank for over two months I decided to call it quits and switch to LunchMoney which is improved frequently and has a lot of neat developer-focused features. However, I had years of historical data in Mint and I didn’t want to lose it when I transitioned. Luckily, Mint allows you to export all of your transaction data as a CSV and LunchMoney has an API. I’ve spent some time brushing up on my JavaScript knowledge in the past, and have since used Flow (a TypeScript competitor) in my work, but I’ve heard great things about TypeScript and wanted to see how it compared…

Building a SouthWest Price Monitor and Learning Server Side JavaScript

I originally wrote a draft of this post in early 2019. I’m spending some time learning TypeScript, so I wanted to finally get my JavaScript-related posts out of draft. Some notes and learnings here are out of date. Both sides of our family live out of state. Over the last couple years, we’ve turned them on to credit card hacking to make visiting cheap (free). SouthWest has some awesome point bonuses on credit cards, but you can’t watch for price drops on Kayak and other flight aggregators. After a bit of digging, I found a basic version of a tool to do just this. It’s a self-hosted bot to watch for flight cost drops so you can book (or rebook for free)…

Building a Chrome Extension to Import Transactions into Mint

I originally wrote a draft of this post in early 2019. I’ve since stopped using Mint and switched to LunchMoney. However, I’m spending some time learning TypeScript so I wanted to finally get my JavaScript-related posts out of draft. I use Mint (although it’s rotting on the vine after being acquired by Intuit), and want to import a list of transactions from a bank account that isn’t supported. However, there’s not a way to do this through the mint UI, but there is a hack someone documented. I know old-school JavaScript but haven’t learned ES6, and I’ve never built a Chrome extension. Building a Chrome extension to use the private mint API to import transactions from a CSV is a perfect learning project…

Building a Docker image for a Python Django application

After building a crypto index fund bot I wanted to host the application so the purchase routines would run automatically. In addition to this bot, there were a couple of other smaller applications I’ve been wanting to see if I could self-host (Monica, Storj, Duplicati). In addition to what I’ve already been doing with my Raspberry Pi, I wanted to see if I could host a couple small utilities/applications on it, and wanted to explore docker more. A perfect learning project! Open Source Docker Files As with any learning project, I find it incredibly helpful to clone a bunch of repos with working code into a ~/Projects/docker so I can easily ripgrep my way through them. https://github.com/schickling/dockerfiles/ Older, but simple Dockerfiles…

Using GitHub Actions With Python, Django, Pytest, and More

GitHub actions is a powerful tool. When GitHub was first released, it felt magical. Clean, simple, extensible, and adds so much value that it felt like you should be paying for it. GitHub actions feel similarly powerful and positively affected the package ecosystem of many languages. I finally had a chance to play around with it as part of building a crypto index fund bot. I wanted to setup a robust CI run which included linting, type checking, etc. Here’s what I learned: It’s not possible to test changes to GitHub actions locally. You can use the GH CLI locally to run them, but GH will use the latest version of the workflow that exists in your repo. The best workflow I found is working on a branch and then squashing the changes…

Lessons learned building with Django, Celery, and Pytest

As someone who writes ruby professionally, I recently learned python to build a bot which buys an index of crypto using binance. The best thing about ruby is Rails, so I wanted an excuse to try out Django and see how it compared. Adding multi-user mode to the crypto bot felt like a good enough excuse. My goal was to: Add a model for the user that persisted to a database Cron job to kick off a job for each user, preferably using a job management library Add some tests for primary application flows Docker-compose for the DB and app admin I’ll detail learnings around Docker in a separate post. In this post, I walk through my raw notes as I dug into the django + python ecosystem further…

Building a Crypto Index Bot and Learning Python

A long time ago, I was contracted to build a MacOS application using PyObjc. It was a neat little app that controlled the background music at high-end bars around London. That was the last time I used python (early 2.0 days if I remember properly). Since then, python has become the language of choice for ML/AI/data science and has grown to be the 2nd most popular language. I’ve been wanting to brush up on my python knowledge and explore the language and community. Building a bot to buy a cryptocurrency index was the perfect learning project, especially since there was a bunch of existing code on GitHub doing similar things. You can view the final crypto index bot project here. The notes from this learning project are below…

How to install an old HomeBrew package

I accidentally ran brew upgrade on a set of packages which caused brew to bump most library packages that were installed on my computer. This caused issues compiling PHP via asdf. I thought it would be easy to install an older version of the offending package, icu4c, but I was very wrong. In recent (2021?) versions of brew. I ended up learning a bit about the homebrew internals and solving Installing an old version of icu4c to fix PHP compilation on macOS I discovered the offending package was icu4c, but the PHP compile script did not indicate that I was using an unsupported package version…

Scripting macOS with Javascript Automation

I’ve been playing with ActivityWatch, a really neat open-source application to track what you are doing when you are on your computer. Similar to rescue time RescueTime, but open source, with some more advanced features. I’ve been using it for a couple of months as part of my digital minimalism toolkit and it’s worked great to give me an idea of what’s taking up my time. There’s been a couple of things that have bugged me about the application, and it’s written in a couple of languages I’ve wanted to learn (Rust, Vue), so I decided to make a couple of changes as part of a learning project. I ended up needing to modify an AppleScript and ran into macOS’s Javascript Automation for the first time…

Migrating from bash to zsh

I love productivity tools. Anyone who works with me knows I love my keyboard shortcuts and tiny productivity hacks. Small, incremental productivity improvements add up over time: feeling fast makes you fast. Plus, I just enjoy tinkering and making things more productive. One of the rabbit holes I love to go down is optimizing my development environment. I spend a lot of time in a terminal, so it’s a fun place to optimize my setup. Ever since hearing of Oh My ZSH I wanted to try out zsh, so I set aside some time to update my dotfiles to use zsh as the default shell. Below are some notes & learnings from the transition. What’s new in zsh? There are lots of small packages out there for neat things like autocomplete, async prompts, etc…

Year: 2021