Stop building fintech with databases. Why I went local-first for Pocket Portfolio. For the last decade, building a fintech app meant one architecture: a centralized PostgreSQL database, a backend in Node or Python, and an API that hoards user data....

CSV Hell: How I Normalized 15 Broker Exports into a Single Local-First Schema If you have ever tried to build anything on top of retail investing data, you already know the truth: Every broker CSV export is garbage. Not a bit inconsistent. Not ...

CI/CD That Ships Itself: Our GitHub Actions Blueprint Pocket Portfolio — 12 Weeks of Shipping Fast releases are only useful if they are consistent and safe. This post breaks down Pocket Portfolio’s CI/CD pipeline on GitHub Actions: how we lint,...

Designing Trust: UX Principles in Fintech Apps Pocket Portfolio — 12 Weeks of Shipping Fintech apps don’t just handle data — they handle belief. If users don’t trust the interface, they won’t trust the numbers behind it. That’s why trust desi...

Modern React Patterns for Financial Dashboards Week 4 of Pocket Portfolio — 12 Weeks of Shipping Financial dashboards are one of the hardest React interfaces to build well. They demand low latency, precise state management, and composable layou...

Rebuilding Pocket Portfolio: Next.js 14 + Firebase + Edge The practical bits that made “never 0.00” possible Pocket Portfolio’s Beta just levelled up — rebuilt for speed, reliability, and developer joy. Why Rebuild Goal: make “never 0.00” pric...

Discussion: Open-source is eating fintech. Which project best embodies transparency in finance — and why? I’m kicking off a thread to collect real examples where open-source has raised the bar on financial transparency — from data provenance and a...

Realised vs Unrealised P/L — Money in Your Pocket vs Money on Paper Most investors check their portfolio and see numbers changing every day — but not all those gains or losses are real. Let’s clear that up. The Simple Truth Realised Profit/L...

Devlog: Extracting Provider Logging into a Shared Module so both quote and health APIs stay in sync > Stack: React + Vite SPA, Firebase Auth/Firestore, Vercel Edge quote + health functions. > Story: “As a developer I want the provider logging logic...

Coming Soon: Price Pipeline Health Widget join the sprint > Sprint starts next week — engineers, designers and beta users welcome DM me. Context Pocket Portfolio’s promise is reliability: never show 0.00 and always explain a number. We already ru...

Designing a “Never-0.00” Price Pipeline in the Real World > Your users don’t care why a quote failed—they care that the number didn’t flash 0.00. Here’s a pragmatic, production-ready pipeline that returns the best price you can get within a strict ...

OpenBrokerCSV v0.1 — Let’s Standardise Broker CSVs So Everyone Can Build Better Tools > Every broker exports a different CSV. That’s fine until you try to import… anything. Let’s fix this together with a small, pragmatic standard and a lightweight...

Today’s ship: Mock-Trade Lab, 5-min CSV Import, and bulletproof Price Fallbacks > We’re building Pocket Portfolio in the open. Today we shipped three slices that make the app instantly useful. !1 1 Mock-Trade & Scenario Lab live What: Add/remove ...

DISCUSS The “Never 0.00” Challenge — design a resilient price pipeline client → edge together > New group, first thread. Let’s start with a problem every finance app faces: your quotes flicker to 0.00 right when users need truth. How do we design a ...

!1 Building finance tools people actually trust: a practical playbook from the Pocket Portfolio trenches > I’m 22s, one of the folks behind Pocket Portfolio — an open-source, no-paywall investing dashboard where you can import a CSV -> get clean li...