javascript Archives - Michael Bianco

Download a CSV of Wealthfront Financial Activity

I use Wealthfront for a portion of my investments. I recently was trying to get a CSV of all my dividends, fees, etc this year and there’s not a way to do this! If you navigate to your activity (homepage > investment account > see recent activity) you can at least generate a CSV from the information on-screen (which does not include your gains/losses from the direct indexing) and copy/paste this into your web console, your browser will spit out a CSV. This is highly tied to the current (as of this writing) Wealthfront HTML structure, so you’ll probably have to ask ChatGPT to fix this in some number of months…

Scraping the web with OpenAI

One of the really interesting LLM use cases is extracting structured data from unstructured data. In the old days (6mo ago), extracting structured data from web pages required custom xpath or css selectors for each website that constantly broke as the host changed their page structure. For instance, extracting the price of a house on redfin. This is why Plaid (and similar competitors) break so often: many of their integrations "screen scrape" which means they need a team of people updating xpath and css selectors on various bank sites (TreasuryDirect, for example, is broken constantly). I built a open source database of venture capital firms that used this approach to extract team member information from each firm…

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…

Tag: javascript