Author: DeanBlackborough

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Budget Pro alpha release

Screenshot of the Budget Pro budget overview and test saying "Budget Pro is Budget on steroids - it's everything you love about Budget improved in every way. More viewing options, more controls, you name it."

We did it! The Budget pro alpha was released. We promised to release the alpha in the first half of the year and we did it.

This post is a little late, the release happened on 2nd June. Since then, we have pushed out several updates as we work towards the beta and the official release. We are working as hard as we can but as per our previous post, we are taking it slow. We want the official release to be as smooth as possible.

During the alpha we are fleshing out the features that make Budget Pro different to Budget and working on the initial user experience. As soon as we get to the beta, we will focus on the collaborative side of Budget Pro.

Budget Pro is usable now if you are willing to do a little data entry at the start. We are working on improving the initial experience and providing several different tools to help you get started. At a certain point though you need to release. If you wait until the next feature is ready, you will never release anything. We are using Budget Pro for our own budgeting needs and like Budget, it is capable even at this early stage.

There is a page on the Budget Pro website which details everything we are planning for the alpha and beta and our status.

It has taken a long time to get to this point. We had to build the API, build the wrong App, build Budget, create some game scorers, and then create Budget Pro. We are proud of what we have created so far and hope it will be a useful tool to many. We understand that whilst budgeting isn’t the most exciting task, you can reap the rewards once you have it established and it opens possibilities. Once we know where we are, we know where we can go.

Please check out the website and let us know what you think. Anyone that signs up before the official release will get gifted a subscription once we release.

https://budget-pro.costs-to-expect.com

Posted on

Connect docker compose apps

A shipping container on the back of a large whale

Locally, I use Docker and WSL2 for development. Inevitably I need to connect multiple docker compose apps, this blog post details how.

If I’m reading data from an API, I might use the public instance of an API. However, as soon as I need to create, update, or delete data, the public API doesn’t work, I switch to using a local instance.

Connect docker compose apps

Connecting multiple docker compose apps is simple as soon as you know how. I’m sure there are multiple ways to do it but the following works for me.

To ensure two or more docker compose apps can see each other, I ensure they use the same network, add the network to each of the docker-compose.yml files as below.

networks:
    default:
        name: costs.network
        external: true

Before you run each of the apps you will need to create the new network, the syntax to create a network is as below.

docker network create [network-name]

If you named your network costs.network as per my example, you would create the network as below.

docker network create costs.network

Your apps will now be able to see each other, all you need now is the URI. The URI should be the service name, if you review the Costs to Expect API docker-compose.yml file, you will see that I have set the service name as costs.api.app, the URI to access the API is therefore http://costs.api.app.