Setting up my finances…the cool way 😎

I’ve embarked on a journey to manage my finances better, 6 months late is still fine huh? I had started something in Python but eventually left that one to collect dust in favor of learning Actual Finance. It’s a docker container that will spin up an app for you to create accounts, categorize finances and help you budget. It strictly follows YNAB(You need a budget) principles but you can configure it to just track expenses, I’m good with that since all I want to do is be mindful of my expenses and making choices to bring down a specific category like restaurants(it’s always food with me)

The Expense Trackers Conclusion

Several months ago, I had expressed wanting to get a handle on my expenses cause I have no real budgeting techniques. After downloading all my statememts, I embarked on a journey to make my own expense tracker in Python. I had a pretty good start with a good concept and the database was fast with DuckDB.

Of course, life happens and I got more focused on the pick a gun and some recent career shifts, the expense tracker was not getting any love. However, my problem still persists. I was watching some video with Linus Torvalds and the speaker opened that he had made Linux in the 90s and git was created in 2005. He was asked that it’s been too long since he made something impactful, so when is he gonna release the next big thing? His answer was a hopeful one for developers at large. He had created his projects because he had problems and no solutions existed for it so he solved it himself. Linus, like other people who are lazy, hopes for other people to solve his problems and he hasn’t felt a need to create something.

Let’s containerize a database!

I wanted a database in my local machine to try out some queries and thought about setting up a little test environment. I didn’t want to go through the process of installing MySQL so let’s make some Docker containers instead.

Docker, the very popular container virtualization solution written in Go. Used as the very building blocks for microservices since it works very well with Kubernetes. I need a small database and don’t care about data persistence for the environment so this is perfect for small POC’s or projects.