Devlog #5: We have a name…

Welcome back to the latest installment of my bi-weekly devlog, where I share updates on building my Expenses Tracker. This not only keeps my network informed but also helps me stay accountable and adds structure to solo-preneurship.

If you missed it, check out Devlog #4: Untitled, where I shared some big steps forward on my Expenses Tracker app. Thank you all for your support and feedback — it’s been a huge motivator!

…CleverCash!

After weeks of referring to the app by its generic name ("The Expenses Tracker") and after tons of brainstorming, I’m happy to announce that I’ve found a name that feels catchy and clearly describes the focus and goal of this application—while also leaving room for future growth: CleverCash. Pretty catchy, right?

I’ve also started playing around with some logo ideas, but that’s still very much a work in progress.

Please feel free to chime in with ideas and feedback on these early sketches!

In other news

I've been busy rewriting my containers, infrastructure, and CI/CD workflows from scratch to accommodate the following changes:

• Security improvements and better secret management with Docker Swarm.
• Deployments with Docker Swarm to the test environment. This will make scaling easier later on, but the main reason for implementing it now was to ensure secrets remain secure inside my Docker containers.
• Infrastructure as code with Terraform, allowing me to provision servers from my command line or pipeline in a deterministic way. With this setup, I spend less time manually configuring servers and can maintain consistency between environments as the application moves to production. This is an incredibly powerful technology that will save me tons of time and reduce ambiguity overall.

All of these improvements allow me to properly test features and bug fixes before pushing them to production. I can now spin up sandbox environments using Terraform, and after configuring my DNS, I can finally access my app through a URL. This means I can also test on real tablets and mobile devices. ??

I’m putting in this extra effort to build a modern, scalable infrastructure so I can confidently roll out new features, knowing that nothing will break in production.

Additionally, I’m prioritizing security hardening to ensure my customers’ data is absolutely safe. I’m also implementing robust fail-safes to prevent any compromise of the app’s operations.

Testers wanted!

After investing so much time in deploying my app to a test environment, I feel it’s time to bring a few test users on board in the coming weeks to provide feedback on the features I’ve been working on for the past 20 months.

If you're interested in getting whitelisted and want some hands-on experience with my app, please let me know, and I’ll contact you via DM!

DevWorld Conference 2025

This time, I had the chance to mingle with fellow developers at DEVWorld Conference hear some great speakers, and stay up to date with the latest trends in tech.

Here’s a snapshot from the first talk of the day for me, where I learned tons about OpenTelemetry (OTEL) and how to leverage metrics, logs, and traces effectively.

My favorite talk was "How Payment Execution Works at IKEA." It was fascinating to see how this initiative evolved—from its inception as a generic internal solution aimed at speeding up teams' workflows to essentially becoming a full-fledged payment provider!

This was incredibly inspiring. I can only imagine the time and energy saved by on-boarding teams with an existing, out-of-the-box solution instead of having them build bespoke services from scratch. Not to mention the positive impact this kind of initiative must have had on engineers' morale. Well done, IKEA! ????

Coming up...

Next sprint will be all about databases—migrations, rollbacks, encryption, and all that good stuff. I want to make sure I’m fully prepared when it comes to such a vital part of the architecture, so I’ll be giving it extra attention.

Stay tuned for the next part of this adventure!