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Billy is here
Billy is the name for my simple-invoicing-and-billing application.
The idea behind Bill is to provide a simple web-based application for invoicing for small businesses and freelancers (me) – and besides generating invoices it helps me to keep track of past due invoices. I’m planning on fixing the generator so I have a one knob solution for recurring bills. So Why Did I Do A RYO Again? Well, of course, the usual reason, but also for other good reasons: In the past, Silke was in charge of sending the invoices. As she’s a designer, everything she does, she does in illustrator. Even writing invoices. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but in the end it just ook her too much time. As we’re picky about how things look, I decided that my templating system would produce an almost perfect copy of her hand-crafted invoices, she is a designer, after all.
Even tough these arguments are good arguments (don’t you think so?) , I must add that the task of getting this right was a little more then I had anticipated, but, hey, it’s free, as in “free beer”, and it’s written in Python and runs on Google Appengine, and after my last proof-of-concept, I wanted to get a better feeling for Appengine.
Current state of affairs is that it’s almost good enough to be used by other people then me, so it’s available for live demo over here, and sources are here.
Dada code…
Code style among programmers touches a sensitive subject. It may be hard to understand for an outsider, but code style can make the difference between grasping the function of a piece of code within seconds, or having to plough trough each line individually, correcting or changing markup as you go. Even while typing, a certain way of “doing” things may influence the logic you’re writing down.
RYO – I’m an apprentice
(RYO – roll your own)
Suddenly, on some rainy sunday afternoon I decided to start buildingmy own “Web Application Framework”
It did not start out as a framework immediately, more like gradually formalizing code I’ve written before into a library, removing overlapsand stubs and cleaning up naming, as a part of a small, quick codeproject I need to finish. With building “my own application framework” I mean that I set out tocreate code for other people to read and use, with a public coderepository and real documentation.The first question, of course, is WHY.