Alright, let me tell you about this little project I worked on, this thing I called a 'casher app'. It wasn't for any big company or anything, just something I thought would be handy, maybe for like, a garage sale or a small craft fair booth.

So, the idea popped into my head because I was helping a friend at a local market, and adding up sales with a calculator and notepad felt clumsy. I thought, "Hey, I could probably whip up something simple on my laptop for this."

Getting Started

First thing I did was just grab a notebook. Yeah, old school. I sketched out what it needed to do. Basically:

• Punch in a price.
• Add it to a running list.
• Show the total amount owed.
• Maybe a way to clear it all and start fresh.

Pretty basic stuff. I decided not to go crazy with features. No inventory tracking, no complex taxes, just the bare minimum to calculate a total quickly.

The Building Part

I figured the easiest way for me was to make it a super simple web page. Just HTML for the structure, CSS to make it not look totally awful, and JavaScript to do the actual work – the adding up and stuff. I already had a text editor, didn't need fancy tools.

So, I started coding. First, I set up the input field where you'd type the price and an 'Add Item' button. Getting that button to actually take the number and list it below took some fiddling. JavaScript can be tricky sometimes when you're just trying to make simple things talk to each other.

Then came the main part: calculating the total. Every time I added an item, I needed the total at the bottom to update. This involved grabbing all the listed prices and summing them up. Took a few tries to get that working smoothly without bugs.

Figuring out how to remove an item if I made a mistake was something I added later. Initially, you just had to clear everything. But that's annoying if you just mistyped one price. So, I put a little 'remove' button next to each item in the list. That required a bit more JavaScript logic, making sure it removed the right item and updated the total correctly.

I also added that big 'Clear All' button. Essential for starting a new transaction.

Trying It Out

Once I had the basic functions working, I just played around with it myself. Typed in numbers, added them, removed them, cleared it. Tried to break it. Found a few small bugs, like sometimes it didn't like numbers with decimals, so I fixed that.

I didn't do any formal testing, just used it myself for pretend scenarios. It seemed to do what I wanted it to do for those simple situations.

Where It's At Now

So, yeah. It's done, I guess. It's just a single HTML file that runs in a browser. It doesn't save anything after you close it, it's not connected to any databases. Super simple. But if you need a quick way to add up a few prices without grabbing a calculator, it works. It was a fun little exercise, reminded me how satisfying it is to build something, even something small, that solves a little problem.