September 14, 2018 in #coding
💳 amorty - morty powered loan amortization calculator
A few weeks ago my wife and I bought a new family car, a grey Ford Expedition, which I call the tank. Buying a car is always super stressful, and the financial negotiations are high pressure and go by way too fast.
origin story
After it was all over with, I wished I had a tool help make faster financial decisions during the negotiations. So with my newfound web development skills I sat down at the computer and made my own loan amortization calculator called Amorty. I knew I had to come up with a catchy name, and I was cracking myself up with the Rick & Morty reference, so I stuck with it.
technologies
It was an easy decision to use Gatsby and React to create this static site. But my hardest choice was deciding if I was going to do the loan amortization calculations myself, or use a library. Ultimately, I went with a library called amortization which did basically everything I needed it to. I wish it had an option to enter the duration in months, but that's something I can add to Amorty myself, or maybe even create a PR for amortization!
I also decided to use a different library for date manipulation. Usually I would reach for Moment.js but instead I used the date-fns library which is much smaller than Moment.js and it's immutable. I highly recommend using it next time you are working with dates.
There is a new library from the folks who created Moment called Luxon which works much like date-fns. It's also worth a look.
more features
While I'm happy with the basic functionality at this point and time, there's lots that could be done.
If you've got any other ideas you should create an issue!