 for personal budgeting and I love it, it's a great tool. On a weekly basis, I will manually reconcile my YNAB transactions with each of my banking providers. This is pretty straightforward as I enter transactions as and when I spend money. In addition, I schedule repeating transactions such as rent.

YNAB is great for one-off purchases and regular payments. However, entering a public transport ticket can be tedious as it's always the same payee, amount and category. The only variable is the date which is irregular. I have no idea how many times I'll take public transport in a given week. 

 has an endpoint where you can add a transaction to your budget. Once I got my personal Access Token I could successfully hit the CRUD endpoints in 

. I then set up an API route in NextJS to hit the YNAB endpoint and integrated the API route with the client.

I wanted the UX to be simple to the point where I didn't have to type. If there was any data entry required then I may as well use the YNAB mobile app. I hid the trigger on my website and now, whenever I get on the tube, I hit the trigger and a transaction is entered in my budget.

This is the most basic of hacks, it's just hitting an API from a front end, and likely only a relevant problem for me. However, it's now turned a tedious task of entering 5 data points into a form field into a fun secret for me. 

Building a custom functionality for irregular transactions

Node

APIs

Irregular budgeting with YNAB API

When I started working with lambda functions I struggled to find a simple solution to check if the correct values were present either in a JSON body or as a query parameter.

I stumbled upon a useful package on npm - 

 - and this was a big step in the right direction. Here is a simple example:

This only checks that there is a value for uuid in the query parameter. A more complex situation could have completely custom validation of the value as well as a custom error message: 

When making a mistake in calling your API, you would now get a specific error message:

Whilst it isn't perfect, it covered my use case pretty well and has saved me time multiple times.

Lambdas

Useful Node lambda error messages

, it was intended to be used in any of the popular browsers. One day, it was integrated into a gaming platform called 

. The in-built browser appeared to be a version of Chromium and so we assumed everything would "just work". 

The content of the site stopped working and upon looking at the Network calls, I realised it was a "CORBs" issue. I'd encountered CORS many times but never CORBs. The API calls to 

 (CMS) were getting blocked but other API calls were working fine. I googled around the issue but didn't find anything particularly helpful.

I was in a bit of a rush to solve this problem, so the way I hacked around it was to create a lambda purely to proxy the call to the Sanity CMS.

Adding that extra API call will be slower, but it solved the core issue and performance wasn't what we were optimising for at the time.

How I hacked my way round a CORBs issue (not CORS)

All Posts

Irregular budgeting with YNAB API

Useful Node lambda error messages

Dealing with Cross-Origin Read Blocking (CORB)