logsuck VS UsTaxes

Interesting! I have it in the backlog that I want to support structured logging via JSON at some point. It's pretty far down the list right now though since I personally haven't used structured logging very much.

I added an issue about it: https://github.com/JackBister/logsuck/issues/7 - if you want to chip in with any comments or even help out with implementing it it'd be much welcomed!

I think it's a little bit beyond "half" baked, but I built a thing I call Logsuck last year: https://github.com/jackbister/logsuck

The idea is to have a free Splunk alternative which you can set up with just one binary. I use Splunk at work and love it, but it just doesn't seem like a product for solo developers (I can't even find a pricing page on splunk.com), and the primary free alternative, the ELK stack, seems a bit complicated to set up.

I am sure that I'll never be competitive with Splunk or Elastic in terms of features or scalability but I'm trying to build something that is at least useful for my own projects.

I built it in Go and use SQLite with the FTS (https://sqlite.org/fts3.html) extension to store the log events in a way where they can be searched quickly.

I’ve been using https://github.com/ustaxes/UsTaxes ; cross-checked with my manual form filing and it’s spot on. Print and mail and save the hassle :)

Yes.

We (PublicDomainCompany.com) are going to do it if someone doesn't beat us to it first. Will be a 2023 project for us (https://github.com/breck7/copypastetaxes).

I've been a supporter of https://github.com/ustaxes/UsTaxes and they are doing amazing grunt work that will be a big part of the solution.

Also, here's a great image of the first income tax return:

Sort of tangentially, I'm working with other contributors on https://ustaxes.org, an open source tax filing webapp https://github.com/ustaxes/UsTaxes.

Currently, many Federal tax forms are supported, as well as tax filing for the state of Illinois. Filing for Oregon and California is under development!

- https://github.com/ustaxes/UsTaxes

I'm working with other contributors on https://ustaxes.org, an open source tax filing webapp https://github.com/ustaxes/UsTaxes. The goal is to make tax filing free for everyone.

There is https://ustaxes.org , an open-source tax filing application, but I'm not adventurous enough to use it when a mistake could be very expensive.

I'm working with other contributors on https://ustaxes.org, an open source tax filing webapp https://github.com/ustaxes/UsTaxes.

Currently, many Federal tax forms are supported, as well as tax filing for the state of Illinois. Filing for Oregon and California is under development!

Perhaps so. Though I found structural things with each of those projects that I did not like. For example, opentaxsolver's logic is a bunch of 'monolithic' C code, and I haven't been able to find any tests. UStaxes is better in that respect, but there I couldn't get past typescript, honestly, and they have code like https://github.com/ustaxes/UsTaxes/blob/master/src/forms/Y20... where they're relying on position of an item in the array to indicate which field it is. Not trying to disparage anyone, but I did not see evidence of an attention to detail I felt I could trust (and maybe that's just me and NIH syndrome).

What I would really like is to somehow extract out a representation of the tax logic into something separate from the business of collecting the data from the user, or even calculating the results. I'm not entirely sure what that would look like, maybe it would have to be some domain-specific language (eww) in order to be able to fully express the relationships and dependencies between different fields/forms.

But I think that tax logic portion is the difficult-to-maintain part, and also the portion different projects would benefit the most from sharing.

There are a couple of open source projects like http://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net/ and https://ustaxes.org/ ; perhaps we should support these to get to the point where they can actually replace TurboTax and H&R.

I bet the laws are unnecessarily complicated and they probably continue to get more complicated due to Intuit's lobbying but opposing that is a much more expensive proposition than supporting an open source project (with code, or financially).