Building a Personal Expense Tracker with OpenTelemetry and CI/CD

(Originally posted on Medium ) I decided to make a personal app to track my expenses. Spreadsheets served me well, but there are some core features that I couldn’t get out of that method: The ability to attach receipts to my records The ability to add images of the items I purchase Viewing and filtering the statistics across any time period without needing new PivotTables There are excellent apps that already exist for this, including: Cashew Day-to-Day Easy Expense Though none of them fit exactly what I wanted. I could have kept searching, but beyond the need for a custom solution, I also saw the opportunity to challenge myself to learn certain topics, including: Unit Testing : with the Android and Spring frameworks Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery : with Jenkins Observability : with OpenTelemetry and the Grafana stack Performance Testing : with JMeter Infrastructure : including Ansible, NGINX, and Linux concepts And so I decided to go ahead and build the app for myself