I continue to work on My Financé, my personal finance tool.

I’ve been struggling to find substantive traction, so I’m trying to niche down to make the tool really helpful for people who want to quit their jobs.

I built a rudimentary planning and forecasting engine, and am trying to run paid ads to see if the signals resonate with people. I don’t love ads, but maybe trying to understand them will further inform my opinion on them.

One thing I would love to come up with is a way to make the app fully local first, while continuing the ability to sync accounts via plaid. It would be great to not be able to see people’s data at all. Im trying to figure out if there is a good user experience I could provide while minimizing the amount of data I actually have access too. Maybe this feature won’t matter to my primary customers though, I’m not really sure.

I still have a ton of fun working on it, and if it never really makes any money I consider it a great success for my personal learning.

Link for the curious:

https://myfinancereport.com/

I have been working on Buckaroo - my table display library for dataframes in notebook environments. Buckaroo adds table and analytics features like histograms, summary stats, sorting, and search to every dataframe. Recently I have been working to make it work better with large datasets.

This involves making it lazy for polars, allowing it to read arbitrarily large files no longer requiring loading the entire dataframe into memory. When a large dataframe initially displays, no summary stats will be available. Summary stats are computed in the background in groups of columns. Then results are cached per column. To accomplish this I wrote a polars plugin in rust that computes hashes of columns. Dealing with large data like this is tricky, operations sometimes crash, sometimes take all available memory, and sometimes they just run for a very long time. I have also been building an execution framework for Buckaroo. It uses multiprocessing based timeouts, and the caching to execute summary stats in the background.

Being able to control the execution, recover from timeouts, crashes and memory exhaustion opens up some interesting debugging tools. I have written methods that take arbitrary groups of polars expressions and produce a minimal reproduction test case through a git-bisect like process.

All of this assures that if individual columns of a dataframe fits into memory, summary stats will be computed for the entire dataframe in the background. And because it is cached, the next time you open the same dataframe, the stats will be display instantly. When exploring data I do this in an adhoc way manually (splitting up a dataframe by columns and rows), but it is error prone. This should all be automatic.

I will be presenting this at PyData Boston in December.

The Column's the limit: interactive exploration of larger than memory data sets in a notebook with Polars and Buckaroo

Resterm - Terminal client for HTTP/GraphQL/gRPC. It includes support for WebSockets, SSE, workflows, profiling, OpenAPI, response diffs and many more.

https://github.com/unkn0wn-root/resterm

I'm working on _prompt injection_, the problem where LLMs can't reliably distinguish between the user's instructions and untrusted content like web search results.

Just published a blog post a few minutes ago: https://alexcbecker.net/blog/prompt-injection-benchmark.html

I’m working on a platform that makes it easy for people in West Africa to buy and sell cryptocurrencies (like USDT, USDC, ETH, BNB, POL, AVAX, etc.) directly with mobile money — the most popular payment method in the region.

The goal is to bridge crypptocurrencies and local mobile wallets to make crypto useful in everyday life — not just for trading, but also for online payments.

A few key features:

Mobile money integration (MTN, Moov, Orange, etc.)

Instant buy/sell of USDT, USDC, ETH, and other assets

Crypto payment gateway — businesses can now accept stablecoin payments directly on their websites

I’m currently focused on improving liquidity and expanding to more countries.

Would love feedback from the community — especially around :

- Liquidity and Marketing to find the first users.

Happy to share more details or collaborate with anyone working on similar problems.

Website : https://ciexchange.xyz/

Stopping Agents [1] - LLM agents that stop conversations early and save time.

Because they're trained using imitation learning instead of RL, they're scalable and easy to deploy with your own data (also open-source!).

Mainly targeted at and tested on quickly disqualifying prospects in sales calls, but can be applied more broadly.

[1] https://stoppingagents.com

Made a website to host a blog! Right now it's empty except for one post describing the process of setting up the blog. I plan to add more stuff once I finish this semester in college.

Website: https://ngonella.com/

I have a bunch of ideas and small projects I would like to write about, so I'm really excited about this.

Tools to help my mental health tracking[0], and sharing with others how I manage my limited amount of energy[1]. They're kind of related, since mental health impacts my energy, so I've needed to prioritize and really make sure I'm spending my time and energy on things that matter. Usually, there's a good mix of things I enjoy doing with things I gain a lot out of. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this!

I've used my app in various forms for around 5 years, rewritten multiple times. But now I'm creating surrounding tooling to help others put my mental model for personal life prioritize to use. I'm writing in the "Saving Spoons" Substack as I go, trying to explain why and how I do things, with advice for others trying to do the same thing.

[0] - https://github.com/eeue56/gobaith/

[1] - http://savingspoons.substack.com/

Working on cross-flock discovery in sanctum [1] so I can cut a 1.0 release hopefully before Christmas.

I am always looking for more people to test and play with it or even review the code. We've got a nice little user community going.

Usually this comments drowns in the crowd of the massive amount of awesome stuff people are building, but if you find sanctum useful, hit me up. Good things are happening.

Stay happy

[1] https://sanctorum.se

I’m building a reward chart app for parents. See link below. I just submitted it yesterday for review the App Store and Google Play. Now I wait. Fingers crossed.

https://whirl.digital/housepoints.html