Plim on Creativity Hacker

Everything Else Is Wishful Thinking

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 13:19:40 +0000

I recently spent a pile of time trying to decide how plim should track debts: both the money you owe to others and the money they owe you. That covers everything from your mortgage to the $30 you loaned Dave at karaoke last Tuesday.

But a solution that covers all of them caught me by surprise — and made plim simpler in the process.

I Caught Me An Assistant!

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Don’t tell anybody, but I’ve finally lured a junior programmer down into my basement. He came for the promise of a few bucks and a little fun, and while he was poking around in my source code cellar, I quietly threw the deadbolt and locked him in.

He’s been there for a week and still hasn’t noticed. And you wanna know the best part?

We’re actually getting shit done.

Foundation Complete

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 07:42:38 +0000

In the last update, I described plim as a finacial rendering engine with a built-in time machine. What I meant was that it doesn’t just store a ledger of what your finances look like today - it keeps a record of everything that has happened, and when, so it can start from the beginning and replay those changes to compute what your finances looked like at any point in time.

Well that engine is done now, so let’s take a look.

Burning It Down to Serve You Better

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 20:28:24 +0000

Sometimes, the best thing you can do for a project is douse it in gasoline and set the whole thing on fire.

Not because you’ve lost faith in the destination, but because the current attempt is standing in the way of getting there.

Come on inside and I’ll explain what I’ve done.

Testing for Gold

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 07:27:40 +0000

For something as crucial as a financial tool, I want to be sure that plim is always extracting an accurate model of my finances from the data files I’ve download from my financial service providers. So, to ensure that new code never breaks that “ground truth,” I’ve added a simple golden file regression testing system, which gets automatically run every time I check in code changes with git.

By carefully curating a set of testing data that illustrates tricky situations and then hand-verifying that the model built from them is correct, I can ensure that plim will faithfully handle the weird cases, even when they occur in live data.

Plim's Command Index

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 21:52:54 +0000

A list of the most important Plim commands and their purpose. This is not intended as an exhaustive list, nor is it meant to specify all the options and modes. The purpose of this file is to serve as a preliminary sketch of the foundational vision, in support of the KOOLAID file.

Crucial Plim Displays

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 11:02:01 +0000

While many of Plim’s displays will be defined fairly clearly by the data structures, a few are crucial to the success of the the app and should be given more considered attention.

Plim's KOOLAID

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 09:02:41 +0000

A concise recap of Plim’s bucket budgeting metaphor, with a description of each critical concept and data file in the system.

Principles for Progress

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 08:35:48 +0000

I started this project over a month ago, but then immediately got sucked into the frenzy of getting my web system finished. So now that Project WebSmith is almost complete, I can finally turn my attention back to Plim.

But I need to proceed cautiously.

How Time Works In Plim

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Sat, 10 May 2025 19:34:22 +0000

To me, budgeting is fun - until something goes wrong - and then it’s like herding fish. Money is always in constant motion, so it’s hard to look at just a single frozen moment - to examine all the parts and see how they fit together - before everything changes again.

Funds go in and out of your accounts a hundred times a day. You get pay deposits, cash withdrawals, you buy stuff on credit or with cash, you pay bills. Then there are the transactions that happen without you even being involved, like automatic bill payments, subscription services, charitable donations… And let’s not even talk about our kids and spouses out in the world spending more money while you’re still in the basement trying to get a handle on what they spent yesterday.