Over the last few years, I’ve been “casually coding” my way to financial independence. Generally, I’ve tracked this using the accountants best friend, excel. Recently, I’ve felt like I should start making a financial independence app for myself. In this series, I’ll run through how I built my tracker app.
Why build your own?
There’s already a ton of FIRE apps, budgeting and finance applications out there already. Budgeting websites like You need a budget and personal capital are genuinely fantastic tools in helping you save and track money, but I’ve always struggled trusting my data with someone else.
Creating your own app lets you fully customise your experience and functionality whilst giving you control of your sensitive financial data. For me, a large part of the financial independence is taking back control of your finances, so having my own app is essential.
What’s the tech?
What’s the tech?
There’s not a lot of sense in making a new app, without trying new technologies. So in this project, I’ll be testing out MongoDB alongside a standard C# implementation. Finally, I’ll look to implement a Blazor front end just for a bit of fun.
This combination should give me a simple backend, with a nicely responsive front end.
Step 1 to Making a Financial Independence app
Step 1, like all other programming tasks, we go and make a coffee. Following a caffeine high, we start to build the backend with MongoDB.
The initial steps to using MongoDB were to:
- Create a new .net core library project.
- Install the MongoDB driver via NuGet.
- Install a local instance of MongoDB on your work station following the guide here.
- Use the MongoDB compass app to connect to your instance (just pressing connect will work if you’ve installed it successfully).
- Create a new database using the “Create Database” button in MongoDB.
After successfully creating a database, we’ll move onto Step 2, building our Financial Independence data store.
