Bankscrap Hackathon

gistfile1.md

Bankscrap Hackathon

Next Saturday we'll be hosting a hackathon at Gudog's office.

What is Bankscrap?

Bankscrap is a Ruby gem to extract balances and transactions from multiple banks. It's a higher level abstraction of the work I did with the BBVA gem. It was initially proposed by ismaGNU from nvivo.

Background and motivation

Most banks don't offer public APIs and the only way to access to your data (balance and transactions) is through their websites... and most bank websites are a f*cking nightmare.

We are developers and we don't want to waste time doing things we are able to automate. Having to perform 20 clicks in an awful website just to check how much money we have is not something we like.

What can I do with Bankscrap?

At Diacode we use it for fetching our bank transactions and displaying them in a Hipchat channel. Our internal invoicing application also uses it to detect when an invoice has been paid by a client.

Think about Bankscrap as an API for your bank. Use your imagination.

What's the goal of the hackathon?

• Improve the API and CLI of Bankscrap
• Integrate the existing BBVA gem into Bankscrap.
• Add tests (for God's sake!)
• Add suport for more banks: ING, Banco Sabadell, etc.
• Have fun
• Profit?

When?

Saturday, November 1st. 10:30

Where?

Gudog's office

Calle Rodriguez San Pedro 2, Madrid. Office 103 -> Map

Who can attend?

Anyone who knows basic Ruby and hates his bank's website. It'd be nice if you get access to a bank account from a different bank so we can work on adding suport for it (Bankia, Caixa, etc.)

BTW... it's free and there will be free coffee and donuts.

For people who are not in Madrid, you can also participate in the hackathon remotely. We'll setup a Hangout and a Hipchat channel for the event.

How can I join the Hackathon?

Just comment on this Gist.

Wait... isn't Bitcoin the future of banking?

Yes, definitely it is. But until the day where we can pay our rent with Bitcoin comes, we are not gonna waste more time fighting our banks' websites.

I'm in, obviously :D

I'll be working today and tomorrow in the ING gem, so hopefully I will finish it the Saturday.

I´m in tooo!!

Im gonna improve the API with ton of features, so any bank integration is gonna be easy peasy

Hey guys, a friend pointed me to your project. It looks really interesting :)

Just wanted to let you know about a OS project I started some weeks ago. It's a Ruby library to parse and analyze financial data (currently coming from CSV files), so to say the step after bankscrap got the data :)
The final tool I'm imagining is something like mint.com, where you see a nice overview and categorization of your financial data...

So in case you want to do more with the data you're scraping, have a look at Muecken (it's still in an early stage). Of course any contribution is welcome, even general thoughts on the project!

I don't think that I'll be able to join the Hackathon on Saturday, but I'll keep an eye on bankscrap and will give it a spin once I need to automate the data retrieval!

Cheers!

@dsager that's interesting! Do you have any examples of how to use the library? I'm seeing the specs of the gem and I think I got a rough idea of how it works, however seeing a basic example of how to use in the readme would be cool. If you are not in Madrid and want to join the hangout we can create a Hipchat room and a Hangout.

Hey @javiercr,
there's a executable in the bin/ folder that has some basic example usage (you need to pass the name of a csv file, the format is static for now, see fixtures/data.csv for an example). Obviously the API isn't final yet, but it might give you an idea where this is headed. This is really meant to be just a library, without any application logic...

I'm based in Barcelona, so I definitely won't be able to attend personally. I'll try to join remotely, can't promise anything though :(