Personal Projects
I do have some random over-engineered side projects that I build for fun for my own personal use.
They're not intended to be widely used or commercialized, but it's nice to have highly customized solutions for my own specific needs.
I also have a very obvious naming scheme.
NOFACE
Net-worth, Outflows, Financial Accounts, Cashflow & Expenses. NOFACE is my personal finance hub. I've tracked my personal expenses for years — it used to be in an Excel workbook, but I've since moved it to a more modern solution, using Python and HTML. It runs locally and opens in the browser with tabs for portfolio, budget, reporting, retirement, and a double-entry journal, all driven from an Excel workbook.
The portfolio side tracks positions and exposure by geography, sector, and asset class, and measures time-weighted return against an allocation-matched blended benchmark with a full risk suite (standard deviation, VaR, Sharpe, beta, information ratio, Treynor, and Jensen's alpha). The retirement tab combines actual spending with the current portfolio value to project conservative, base, and optimistic paths in today's dollars.
CATBUS
Client Administration & Tax Booking Utility System. CATBUS is the system that runs the UW AFSA Tax Clinic. It covers the full clinic workflow, from volunteer applications, onboarding, and scheduling through client intake, queue management, and completing returns.
It supports around 150 volunteers each season, along with queue masters and administrators. Google Sheets serves as the database and Google Apps Script handles the business logic, with a React front end on Cloudflare that volunteers and clients use.
You can't actually view the application, as it's only available to those who are part of the UW AFSA Tax Clinic and is password-protected.
CALCIFER
Centralized Architecture for Linking, Coordinating, Indexing, File Execution, & Review. CALCIFER is a personal project-management tracker, with added citation referencing and grammar checking, the little flame that powers my productivity engine. I used to use Zotero, Grammarly, and Microsoft Teams trackers, but since I move around a lot on different devices, locations, etc., it was getting annoying trying to ensure everything was in sync and accessible from any device with multiple applications
Plus I was getting tired of SaaS products that always needed me to be connected to the internet. When I expanded my data storage to use a NAS, I built a centralized project management tool.
CALCIFER keeps projects, tasks, notes, references, citations, and writing checks in one desktop app, and your data stays on your machine.
Project metadata is stored as plain YAML alongside each project, so it stays readable and works with Git. The reference library supports tagging, PDF preview, Zotero and CSL JSON import, and DOI lookup. CALCIFER also inserts and refreshes citations and bibliographies directly in Word, and runs offline style and grammar checks on your writing.