Recent Posts
My business is dying
Revenue and Monthly Recurring Revenue are down significantly since we peaked in February 2026.
Revenue is down 24% since February 2026.
Monthly Recurring Revenue is down 12% since February 2026.
This has happened to me before with an application I made called Girlfriend Plus. In 2017 revenue spiked, but I didn’t do much development on the app. Pretty quickly revenue dropped off. Today it basically makes no money.
Why not always OCR?
In a previous post I talked about how OCRing the PDF would solve the problem I was facing. However, I chose to process the PDF with a different method. Someone in the hacker news comments had this to say.
This person is not wrong, but I’d like to point out some other scenarios where reading the PDF is a better solution than using OCR to process the PDF.
Identifying statements
When processing a bank statement, the first thing we do is classify the statement into a document_type. Once it is classified we run special rules for that document_type.
Why are all the amount values negative?
A few days ago I got this email from a customer. Something about all the amounts coming out as negative. I converted their PDF to verify the issue they described.
PDF Sample
Converted Sample
The customer was right, all the amounts were coming through as negative. Pretty weird. Interestingly the column headers also end with minus sign characters. I then opened up the PDF in a debugging tool called PDFSnake to see how the text is encoded. Let’s look at how the values “$110.00-” and “$1,527.57” are encoded.
Psst! Want to see a cool bug?
Yesterday I was going through error reports and I saw this email.
At first I was kind of annoyed, often users like to merge multiple PDFs into one large PDF to abuse my free plan and convert more than one PDF a day for free. Then I looked at the PDF and thought “Ah actually this is supposed to convert correctly even if the PDF has been merged into one mega PDF”.
When You Don't Know How Your App Works
On Monday morning I was going through emails and see one from a user telling me the forgot password form isn’t working. That’s weird, it’s the kind of thing that doesn’t really break. I try resetting their password for them using the form, the form errors out. That’s weird. It turns out this user’s email address was capitalised, and the query code that fetches a user by email address sends in the lowercase value of their email.