At the very heart of Actual is a custom syncing engine. Recently I implemented full end-to-end encryption (not released yet) and it inspired me to audit the performance of the whole process. In the future I'll blog more about using CRDTs for syncing, but for now I'd like to talk about a PostgreSQL f...

I just released a new version of Actual and a big change is a rewrite of the budget table. It might not look like much, but it pays down a lot of technical debt and is a big improvement in many ways. The previous design resulted in a poor user experience despite good intentions. This is a look at ho...

I made a big change recently: I joined Stripe as a developer on a team that works on the dashboard. Today is my first day! First, let me say that I'm really excited. I talked to Alex Sexton 5 years ago about joining Stripe, but the timing wasn't quite right. It's always been on my list of companies ...

There's a horrifying realization as you work with software of how fragile it is. Failures can happen almost anywhere, and a lot of code isn't equipped to deal with it. We can at least assume, in JavaScript, that when your code is executing it will keep executing until it either ends or waits for som...

I posted a follow-up twitter thread with a final spreadsheet and learnings. In my last post I showed my process for forecasting costs and profits for Actual based on various metrics. This helps me find much-needed answers to questions like "how much cost for acquiring users can I afford?" I'm new to...