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Here’s how double-entry accounting creates an effective budgeting system.

How they fit together

Zero-sum budgeting (giving every dollar a job) and double-entry accounting (every transaction affects two accounts) work perfectly together because both ensure everything balances to zero. When you gain $100, it must be assigned somewhere. When you spend $50, both your bank account and budget category decrease.

Core components

Accounts: Where you money physically lives (checking accounts, credit cards).

Categories: What you plan to use your money for (groceries, rent, fun money).

Transactions: Money moving between accounts and categories.

Account types

Traditional accounting has five account types, but for budgeting we focus on three:

• Assets (your bank accounts): Increase with credits, decrease with debits.
• Liabilities (your credit cards): Increase with credits, decrease with debigs.
• Equity (your budget categories AND income): Increase with credits, decrease with debits.

Why Categories Are Equity, Not Expenses

In traditional accounting, groceries would be an expense account. But in budgeting, your “Groceries” category isn’t tracking what you’ve spent – it’s tracking what you can spend. It represents a portion of your wealth assigned to a specific purpose. That’s why categories work like equity accounts.

Why Income Is Equity, Not Revenue

Your Income category works as an equity account rather than a revenue account because it temporarily holds unallocated funds until you distribute them to categories.

Income functions as “unassigned equity” while budget categories represent “assigned equity.” Budgeting is simply the process of moving equity from unassigned to assigned status.

How Transactions Work

Getting paid:

Account	Type	Action	Amount
Checking	Asset	Debit (+)	$1000
Income	Equity	Credit (+)	$1000

Budgeting money:

Account	Type	Action	Amount
Income	Equity	Debit (-)	$200
Groceries	Equity	Credit (+)	$200

Spending money:

Account	Type	Action	Amount
Groceries	Equity	Debit (-)	$50
Checking	Asset	Credit (-)	$50

The Benefits

This approach provides accurate accounting: everything maintains balance, errors are identifiable, and you can track both the location of your money (accounts) and its purpose (categories).

Zero-sum budgeting powered by double-entry accounting gives you a complete system for managing your personal finances effectively.

I saw a post in Hacker News about Richard Feynman’s blackboard at the time of his death. The first comment mentions his motto: “What I cannot create, I do not understand.”

This motto matches the Not Invented Here syndrome and how I’ve been learning programming.

When I first started to get serious about Frontend development, there was Backbone.js. This amazing library abstracted concepts into an easy-to-use API that allowed you to build powerful Frontends.

However, before I started using it, I had an urge to understand it, so I wrote my own version. After I nailed down the concepts, I was comfortable using Backbone.js.

This post is a glorified bookmark with notes reminding me how I started learning these things.

This simple setup can help us expose our local development environment to the public internet. I usually paid for ngrok, but the last time I tried them, they were expensive, and their customer support was terrible.

For a small-size project, we can build our own small ngrok with Linux, Caddy, and SSH port forwarding.

Requirements:

• A VPS with Linux. In this example, we will use Ubuntu 20.01 LTS
• SSH access to your server
• Caddy
• A domain name. In this example, we will use mydomain.io

Add DNS record

We need to add two A records to our domain DNS zone:

• An A record pointing to our server’s IP address
• A wildcard A record pointing to our server’s IP address

For example, if our server IP address is 5.164.71.442, our records will look like this:

Hostname	Type	Address
@	A	5.164.71.442
*	A	5.164.71.442

Configure Caddy

First, Install Caddy.

Then, create a Caddyfile to route traffic from a specific domain name to a local port; in this case, we will do app.mydomain.io and port 8881.

touch ~/Caddyfile

app.mydomain.io {
  reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:8881
  log {
    output file /var/log/access.log
  }
}

Reload caddy.

caddy reload

> 2023/05/30 17:55:25.272 INFO    using adjacent Caddyfile

And our server is ready.

Create an SSH tunnel

With SSH, you can create a secure connection between your computer and the server, with the services relayed, i.e., every request to the server will be forwarded to your local development environment.

For example, if we are building our application in localhost:8000, we can do the following:

# ssh -R <server port>:<server domain>:<local port> <server ssh user>@<server domain>
ssh -R 8881:app.mydomain.io:8000 user@mydomain.io

Now, every request you send to app.mydomain.io will be forwarded to localhost:8000 on your computer.

Resources

• SSH/OpenSSH/PortForwarding (help.ubuntu.com)
• awesome-tunneling (github.com)

No artificial intelligence was used in the making of this post.