Announcement: Co-founder joins as we approach v1.0
Big news today - I am very pleased to announce that Juan Olvera, a software engineer with almost a decade of experience, is joining Budgetwise as co-founder! I've known Juan for several years now and our personalities, philosophies and work ethics were so similar that we started working together organically.
A little about Juan: As a husband and father of three, he has been working hard to advocate semantic web and accessibility, with a strong belief that anyone should be able to use the web regardless of any potential disabilities. Being a part of the tech industry for nine years and running a popular finance blog has given Juan a broad set of skills, and he is currently pursuing AWS certification to further round out his talents. Outside of work, Juan loves spending time binging TV shows with his wife, having fun with his kids, playing with his dog, and continuing to learn new things.
Together, Juan and I have been working on rewriting Budgetwise from scratch and I touched on it briefly in the previous blog post. Before we go into detail on the upcoming changes, it would be helpful to understand the current state of Budgetwise. For context, the software originally launched as an MVP (minimum viable product) to get initial thoughts, feedback, and ideas to iterate on. Features were added quickly, bug fixes were patched in, and the codebase kept growing. The user base grew so quickly since launch, however, that there wasn't much time to go back and optimize the things that needed optimization.
There was the total frontend rewrite from last summer, but that didn't touch anything on the server or database side, and still left room for improvement on the frontend. With a good sense of what the "v1.0" feature set will look like and a firm (as of yet undisclosed) product roadmap, now was the best time to say "OK, it's time to go back to the very beginning and rebuild Budgetwise from top to bottom into a polished, high performance version that is fit for widespread adoption."
With Juan working alongside me, we have been spending a lot of time reimagining each feature and better understanding how they fit together. To name just one example, previously there were separate calculations for each of the main numbers on a budget screen - the budgeted column, remaining column, and the transactions needed to calculate the activity column for categories, category groups, and total sums at the top of the table. Now all calculations will be crunched from a single source and passed out accordingly in order to eliminate the risk of any errors in the numbers.
Drag and drop feels incredibly crisp and smooth, entering and managing transactions won't feel like a chore anymore, and overall performance improvements will be noticeable across all devices, especially mobile phones. On top of all that, account login/authentication will be much more secure, 2-Factor Authentication will come later this year, and the server and database is being given as much attention and improvement as the frontend.
There is still more work to do - namely, perfecting the account/transactions page and designing an easy way to migrate existing users to the new platform once it launches. A hard date isn't set yet, but the next few weeks should shed some more light on the timelines. Everything is being planned out and executed with upcoming features in mind, so high-impact additions like a robust chart system, mobile app, or the debt management system will be significantly more straightforward and quicker to build.
If this release goes as smoothly as we believe it will, there will only be a handful of updates left before early access pricing ends and version 1.0 launches. As I've mentioned before, you are locked into the discounted pricing for life if you sign up for a free trial before 1.0 is out even if your trial lapses (there will be plenty of notice beforehand, it won't be a last-minute thing), so make sure to sign up and give it a try!