invoice

Plain text is great. 20+ years of my notes are in plain text, facilitated with https://github.com/nickjj/notes. Also been doing plain text invoicing for around 7 years with https://github.com/nickjj/invoice. There's also Plutus https://github.com/nickjj/plutus for income and expense tracking. Couldn't be happier. All I do now is export my bank's CSV files and import them into Plutus, a few minutes later my books are done after I align some of the categories. I've done 2 years of taxes with this now.

> Unsurprisingly I disagree with the post's description of awk being an "advanced command". I think it can be pretty advanced, for me awk is one of those tools where I still feel like I need to write a paragraph of comments to explain 1 line of code. For example: https://github.com/nickjj/invoice/blob/75660dce5a29ceb4e47a6... Keep in mind I don't really "know" awk. I cobbled that together from a few examples. It will convert times formatted like "2h 30m", "150m" or "2:30" into 2.50. There's a bunch of examples in the test file. NOTE: I wrote that script 2.5 years ago and I know there's questionable patterns in other areas of the script that's not highlighted like using a bunch of separate echo calls instead of a heredoc. Shell scripting is really fun and efficient. I use it all the time for a variety of things.

A whole bunch of little things, mainly command line tools. Most of them are open source and also have extensive documentation and a screencast video going over them. Here's a few examples: - https://github.com/nickjj/notes - https://github.com/nickjj/invoice - https://github.com/nickjj/wait-until And a few recent scripts to optimize very specific workflows: - https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/using-ffmpeg-to-get-an-mp3s-d... - https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/a-shell-script-to-keep-a-bunc... - https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/bash-aliases-to-prepare-recor...

I've been freelancing for ~20 years. I have a Google Drive template that I use. Then for clients I copy last month's invoice for the new month, add in whatever info I need to (usually very little) and save it as a PDF to email them. Once a month I create and send these invoices to a handful of clients. I also wrote https://github.com/nickjj/invoice to automatically tally up how much I should bill each client. All in all I spend about ~10 minutes a month creating invoices.

Too many to list here, but one of my most useful ones is a Python script to help pay out affiliates. It crawls through monthly CSV files provided by my payment gateways, finds sales and returns by a specific affiliate, calculates what I owe them and returns a dollar amount, a sales break down for each course, how to send it (paypal, wire, etc.) and who to send it to. It's nice because it takes around 2 minutes to payout everyone each month with a very high confidence level in the results. Prior to the script, it was a stressful work flow with many chances of human error. I only did it once before automating it. Another script I use helps me invoice my freelance clients each month. It's a Bash script and is open source https://github.com/nickjj/invoice. It saves me a ton of time every month since I can calculate how much I need to invoice

If you like writing things that you can execute on multiple machines take a look at Ansible. It's a Python based configuration management tool where a majority of what you write is YAML and Jinja 2 templates. But on that note, a majority of my current shell scripts are being used on my dev box to improve my day to day. Things like this: https://github.com/nickjj/invoice