Responsive Finance App

What are you most proud of, and what would you do differently next time?

• I am most proud of building a complete, responsive personal finance dashboard with multiple pages and interactive features. The project includes transaction searching, sorting, filtering, pagination, budget and savings-pot management, recurring bills, keyboard navigation, visible focus states, and responsive layouts.

• I am also proud of creating a reusable JavaScript data layer that keeps financial calculations, currency formatting, date formatting, and shared data handling consistent across the application.

• Next time, I would plan the application architecture and state management earlier. I would also add automated unit and end-to-end tests from the beginning, connect the app to a database for persistent data, and include authentication so each user could securely manage their own financial information.

What challenges did you encounter, and how did you overcome them?

• One challenge was managing shared data and behaviour across several pages. I overcame this by creating reusable data-loading and formatting functions and using a shared source of truth for the application's financial information.

• Another challenge was rendering dynamic content and keeping interactions working after the page changed. I solved this by using event delegation, allowing shared event listeners to handle dynamically created buttons, menus, and modal controls.

• Calculating accurate financial information was also challenging. I had to filter transactions by category, date, and transaction type before calculating totals for budgets and other sections. I overcame this by creating calculation helpers instead of hard-coding values.

• Responsive design and accessibility required additional attention. I used mobile-first CSS, Flexbox, CSS Grid, semantic HTML, keyboard-friendly controls, visible focus states, skip links, aria-current, and reduced-motion preferences to improve the user experience across devices.

What specific areas of your project would you like help with?

I would like help with the following areas:

• Connecting the application to a database so user data is saved between sessions.
• Adding secure account creation, login, authentication, and authorization.
• Improving the application's state management as the project becomes more complex.
• Writing unit tests for financial calculations and data-handling functions.
• Adding end-to-end tests for workflows such as creating budgets, updating savings pots, and filtering transactions.
• Testing the application with screen readers and improving its overall accessibility.
• Improving loading states, performance, and progressive enhancement.
• Reviewing the code structure and identifying opportunities to make the application easier to maintain and extend.