🔥 Weekend Reading

I write a weekly email for people in tech.

Tools and products you should know about, tips about UX, management, infosec; random and funny stuff

Schedule C, translated

When you file as a freelancer or sole proprietor, your business expenses go on Schedule C, and Part II of that form is a list of 23 lines with IRS-precise names. Office expenses and supplies are two different lines. Meals are half deductible and entertainment has been zero since

Weekend Reading — Can somebody else do it for me?

Kristin Scearce Tech Stuff tinyjs Backend with full system access, a native webview window, and that’s it. No Electron. No bundled Chromium. I like the simplicity of it, but I'm sticking with Tauri for now. Goodbye to the Hard Parts That Never Mattered AI is not burying

Expense, am i being smart with my money?

Ask an expense tracker whether you are being smart with your money and it will refuse. Expense refused too, until now. It knows what you spent, not what you earn. That refusal was honest, and useless. It also assumed something false: that judging a year of spending requires someone else&

Ask your expenses a question

When you're looking at your past expenses, you need to know how to filter them. That's usable, and the filter is easy to write, with the help of autocomplete. But what if you need to ask a question? "Did I spend more on AI this

Weekend Reading — Invisible as someone else's problem

Cat (D.Burch) Connect to Expense There's a debate going on whether MCP is better than API/CLI access, since modern LLMs have access to the CLI and can do REST over HTTP easily. I think it's a pointless debate. APIs have their own design guidelines,

September 24th, 2026 1 min read

Expense in foreign currency

The IRS wants foreign spending in dollars, converted at the rate for the day you paid. Not the day you file, and not the day you finally remember the receipt. Expense does that conversion itself now. The rate is the ECB's daily reference for the expense date, fetched

September 22nd, 2026 1 min read

Connect to Expense

A feature can be finished and still be unusable. Expense has had an MCP server for a while: point an assistant at https://expense.labnotes.org/mcp, it discovers the OAuth flow, you sign in once. That part works. The part that did not was the last mile. The how

September 19th, 2026 9 min read

Weekend Reading — Skeletons in the closet

Neatnik "Everything can be accessible." 🎉🎉🎉 Fastmail just approved Expense’s OAuth client. I believe we's now the first expense tracking app that can collect receipts from Fastmail (and JMAP in general). To me, because I use Fastmail for my emails, it's more exciting than

September 17th, 2026 1 min read

Expense: One receipt, once

There are four ways for the same receipt to enter Expense: forward it by email, drag the file into the editor, let the MCP tool fetch it, connect a mailbox and have it imported for you. Each route used to check metadata on its own, so the same PDF arriving