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AndreiCalazans | 2 years ago

What's with people building open source finance managers? This is like the 1000th one I have seen.

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thesuitonym|2 years ago

Needing a way to track finances is a problem older than writing. It's an almost universal problem, and everyone has their own ideas on how it should be done.

It's also a complicated idea, and when you look at existing solutions, they almost always have a huge number of features that any given individual won't need, which makes it harder to figure out what you're doing.

If you have a background in programming, and none in finance, it might be easier for you to start from what you understand, and build up an app that does what you need first, then add features later as you understand the problem space more.

Mountain_Skies|2 years ago

No idea if it's still the same now, but banking account management, both from the consumer and the bank side, used to be very common example use cases when teaching OOP. Maybe some of those example projects grew into hobbies which grew into OSS projects.

Cthulhu_|2 years ago

Along with note taking and todo apps, it's low hanging fruit. It's a problem most people / developers can understand without having to do a lot of studying, and it fits in people's heads.

But it's also often an example of people not willing to learn a new tool, or not willing to pay for one, so why not build a new one? How hard can it be?

sumtechguy|2 years ago

> How hard can it be?

The number of stupidly huge complex projects I got myself roped into with that dumb phrase...

InitialLastName|2 years ago

It's also (similar to note-taking and TODO) a problem that can be approached in a lot of different ways, for people with very different needs and mental models.

Building an app that fits your mental model can be very instructive (including helping you flesh out your own understanding of the problem space).