Well, they can actually be helpful. I've found a lot of good info on company blogs from engineers about embedded programming, electronics, and other topics.
You can also think of it as marketing for engineer types who are usually immune to formal forms of marketing. Managers don't care about details, they want to see $ numbers. Engineer types want gory details. So your engineering blog can help market your products to engineers. Just look at intels documentation pages vs their actual intel.com site. intel.com is marketing 101 eyesore.
An example would be a blog from a semiconductor company making analog circuits. Think Bob Pease types. They'll talk about a specific problem or circuit, go into the bloody details, math, schematics, charts, graphs, etc. Then toss you a product from their portfolio that can solve the problem.
This is an oft repeated suggestion. But the problem is that, there is very little step by step commentary on these codepens. Its mostly only the final step that is presented. I tried recreating some and then got stuck with finer points of positions, margin-auto etc. Thats when I realised I need to solve some advanced CSS puzzles. Thanks anyways!
Neat idea. I would definitely use it, if you promise that that experts would NOT be from low cost countries like India, Romania etc (why? Because as a person from these countries, I want to learn parenting methods from advanced countries.)
All of our experts are in the United States partially because I have a firm understanding of the various licenses and credentialing they hold, which isn't consistent across countries. Our team of experts is truly amazing! I would love for you to check us out and let me know what you think.
I am working on a website which where people give feedback to each other's interview performance. Part of the backend is ready , but I need frontend help. Mostly HTML/CSS and some javascript.
It depends on whether the person is on L-1 visa or H-1 visa. If L-1, I can't help. But if its H-1, In all probability, the guy is just afraid of interviewing outside. As someone mentioned below, changing job is tough but not very tough.
I am working on a website which where people give feedback to each other's interview performance. Part of the backend is ready , but I need frontend help. Mostly HTML/CSS and some javascript.
So, pertinent question. I want to move my account to a bank which gives me an API so I don't have to deal with Plaid or Mint. I.e. I want data privacy. I want to build a personal dashboard of where my money is going.
Lobby your lawmakers. Banks have no incentive to provide open APIs.
For example, in the UK banks did nothing until they were forced to - the market regulator now requires the nine largest banks to provide an open API (https://www.openbanking.org.uk).
Open Banking is a sham. It mandates account access for "AISPs" which need to be registered, audited, etc which is unfeasible for a solo developer especially when releasing a free/open-source product. Worse, it doesn't actually mandate your access to your own account, so that still depends on the bank. The modern banks provided APIs even before open banking so we're good, but the legacy ones still don't provide personal APIs.
It's not ideal, but I wouldn't call it a sham. Vulnerable users' banking details are highly targeted by fraudsters, and I can see the concern from lawmakers that making it mandatorily open to all via some oauth style flow (for ex) would limit the banks from controlling access to scammers.
The law doesn't restrict the banks giving access to non-AISPs and, like you say, many of the modern banks do have personal API access, it just sets a minimum bar you have to reach before they're forced to let you in. It seems like a pragmatic middle ground.
What is bad, in my eyes, is the law currently only applies to the CMA9.
If you find one let me know. That was the promise of Simple Bank when they launched. I've been with them around 7+ years now and a couple years in they quietly removed that claim from their website and support responses said they weren't working on it anymore. They are still a decent bank but API access never materialized.
In fact I randomly came across me bemoaning this fact 5 years ago lol [0]. Also at one point I wrote my own small wrapper to access parts of their internal API [1] but I haven't touched that in years so I seriously doubt it still works at all.
I must say I was quite surprised when I read this comment. In Germany we have FinTS [1] with an open specification and I'm not aware of a single bank that doesn't support it. It's been around since 2002 [2] and is based on HBCI, which became available in 1998 [3].
I suspected it might be different elsewhere, but I had no idea that the situation was so dire that you had to actively go looking for a bank with an API.
FinTS does not solve the problem of (scoped) authentication and authorization at all.
It merely provides a standardized interface to access account data or initiate transactions, but it still uses a plain username/password login to authenticate.
Even that it does not do particularly well – the protocol is horrendously outdated and does not support "recent" inventions like credit cards on many popular banks, which means that banking aggregators have to fall back to screenscraping anyway.
However, this will hopefully change soon with PSD2/SCA, which does mandate such secure account access (based on OAuth2, if I understand it correctly).
In theory, you could use OFX, which is an open standard that powers the "Download transaction" feature of Quicken/MS Money
In practice, banks never tell you the address of their OFX server and you have to rely on community compiled database (eg ofxhome); many banks' implementations are iffy; some banks even charge you for enabling OFX support on your account. In the end it's just so much easier to outsource this to Plaid, which is why they are a billion dollar business.
You could try Actual [1], which stores your data locally. It does however go through Plaid. Would be interesting if there was an alternative option to screenscrape your online banking portal.
What about OCR'ing (or extracting from an electronic PDF) your bank statement each month and then parsing the data into your desired format? You could add tags, metadata, etc. as well.
I'm thinking of something where you download your statement (usually available in PDF form) and then drag it to a web interface where it then gets OCR'd and processed.
A bit more manual, but the upside is you're not leaking your creds and you should also have access to more data (banks have to provide statements and they usual provide them going back many years).
Every bank I use provides _some_ sort of structured data export (at the very least a csv, and in most cases a more finance-specific format (OFX, etc). I'm not talking "modern" banks here, either (Ironically, the most modern bank I use, Aspiration, only provides exports in a non-standard csv format)
In the absence of APIs from most banks, it would be nice if there was a client side personal finance web app that allowed uploading .csv or pdf statements, and scraped those for you locally, perhaps with the option of using your own Google Drive or Dropbox as a persistent storage backend beyond browser localstorage.
