New: Calculators!

I’ve been busy building a new section of the site dedicated to Calculators!.

Calculators are interesting things, especially when you can quickly change variables and see the result set update.

Calculators will become an important section for growth going forward. The first calculator to be released is a Compound Interest Calculator, illustrating the amazing effects of compounding interest in savings accounts. The calculator gives you access to all the data as the interest rolls up each year, as well as graphing the accumulation curve.

Making calculators as interactive as possible is one of the goals. In addition, all calculators will have a full API for programmatically accessing the result sets, or for creating direct links with starting parameters for the calculator to pre-populate the calculator. For example, Here’s a link to illustrate how £10,000 can become £34,582.51 over 10 years, and if you want to access the data directly, you can use a command line tool like cURL:

curl https://maniacalrobot.co.uk/calculators/compound_interest.json?capital=10000.0&frequency=quarterly&monthly_deposit=100.0&rate=6.0&term=10

Simply appending .json to the path will automatically give you a JSON result set, which you can then use with other programs.