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pk3

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Day job: Twilio Non-day job: dqydj.com Also not building during the day: charityrecord.com

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https://charityrecord.com

I'm working on a charitable donation tracker for taxpayers. My wife and I used Intuit's ItsDeductible for years until it shut down in October. With a little encouragement, I built Charity Record.

The stack is Django 5.2 (I know, I know, I'm looking at 6 now), Postgres, and HTMX + Alpine.js for interactivity. I'm using Polar for subscriptions. It's running on the $12/mo DigitalOcean droplet.

Trickiest parts so far: TXF export (we can trace TXF back to the 1990s...) and PDF generation. At one point when working on PDFs, WeasyPrint was deadlocking a single-worker setup because it fetched the logo via HTTP. (Base64-embedding the logo got me past that, ha.)

Happy to answer questions about the app or running Django lean - I've got a few longer running Django projects.

More in the sense that we don't realize how spoiled we are (and how the standards have improved). I don't even have to leave this table to see the effects of share issuance or buybacks from a public company, and it's all updated in close to real time for me.

It's not that you couldn't make a _pretty-reasonable_ estimate, it's just that the ecosystem is much improved and easier to roll up for the indices we follow today. The Wilshire is from the 70s and the first flavor of the S&P came 30 years after the Dow (and was 'only' 90 firms). If you read Security Analysis (first edition: 1934) you can still see some of this in action; it mentions how only some statistical services (paid!) would calculate/estimate the current number of shares outstanding.

I wouldn't go so far as to call it useless - anachronistic perhaps, but useless no.

When the Dow was first calculated, real time market capitalization for individual companies wasn't a thing. Prevailing market price was a decent enough proxy that Charles Dow could make an index of leading industrial firms out of prices (and price changes) alone.

As others have pointed out, over a long enough time period the Dow Jones has a high correlation with market cap weighted indices. Its annual volatility has been about 1.5 percentage points more a year, but average returns over any reasonable holding period are barely different than, say, the S&P 500.

There's an even better argument against the Dow than the price weighting though - the somewhat arbitrary company inclusions. One of the more interesting pieces of history is IBM's 40-year 'vacation' from the Dow. If IBM had stayed in for the 40 years after 1939 you could tack on another 5 figure number to today's index price.

If the side business is profitable (and makes enough to enact this plan), it works like this for a solo 401(k): the employee's contribution (you) up to $18,000 and a profit sharing contribution up to 25% of the business earnings. For 2017, it maxes out at $54,000 if you're under 50 years old.

Keep in mind though that maximums are per person not per company; if you keep the day job 401(k) (and potential match) you'd have to reduce the contributions from your side business to not exceed the maximum.

https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/one-participant-401k-pl... https://scs.fidelity.com/products/mobile/sepMobile.shtml