How MoneyTracker, a personal finance application, Was Born
Where is the money going? That was the question on my mind in 2006. I wanted a way to track my expenses. That’s how MoneyTracker was born.
In the beginning, there was a text file. “Wait, a text file?” I hear you ask. Well, yes. I wanted something simple. I still do. Everyone does - at first. But complexity tends to grow with our needs. I can’t count the number of times I was commissioned to build a “super simple” system only to dig into the details and you know what lies there, don’t you?
Money Tracker Release 1.0.1
After many years of private development, I have decided to publish the source code for Money Tracker, my personal finance manager. The story of how it came to life is another post I am still working on but it’s been online for quite a while. With that, I am hoping to publish a release blog post whenever there is something substantial to share about the new release.
A lot of work went into this release though most of it is not visible to the end user.
Adding Syncthing to Telegraf+InfluxDB+Grafana(TIG) stack to monitor remote machines
In the previous blog post, I set up Telegraf instances to push host metrics to an InfluxDB instance that was set up within my home network. But there’s a problem.
One of the machines that I also want to keep an eye on is a Linode VPS that I run my projects on. But to do that, the Telegraf instance running on the VPS should be able to reach the InfluxDB instance inside my network.
Monitoring My Servers with Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana
I was on the lookout for a simple monitoring solution to keep an eye on a few servers that I am managing. There’s no shortage of monitoring solutions to choose from these days. However, I got lost in a sea of complexity. Most of them were meant for the enterprise. Meaning they were slow, complex and expensive. Not surprising, I guess, considering that’s where the money is. The solutions also seemed like they were meant for monitoring 100s(1000s?
Per-host settings.py for Django projects
When working as part of a team on a Django project, it is often useful to have a per-host settings file. There are many ways to do this but the approach that I liked most is creating a local_settings.py file in each environment.
I’m often the only programmer on web projects, but even then I still find it helpful to have a local_settings.py file on my local host. In it I include things such as debug-related settings, test keys for the different API providers, a modified logger configuration and flags that turn off any added security measures.