This is a short summary of all the things I’ve been working on for the past year. It was a packed schedule for all aspects of my life, and taking time at the end of the day to sit down and learn something new wasn’t always the top priority. But I was able to squeeze in a few useful topics that have been fun in my time off work. Most of the coding and technology skills were used to build out my home website.

Computing

For a little over a year I have been internally hosting a Flask website that takes in expense data and tracks savings progress in Python. This all hooks in to a SQLite database which I can query or run simple analytics on to track my financial goals. It started out very basic with Jinja templates that would show the results of queries, but has since grown to support almost all of my financial needs.

During the first half of the year I decided to really step it up. I optimized the back end and made more efficient use of SQL queries. During the late spring and early summer I learned JavaScript basics and wrote an API layer so that I could run Asynchronous queries and update the DOM to reflect this. I improved the overall layout of the site with more refined CSS. Then, towards the end of the year, I again improved on the layout and fixed all the spaghetti code that I wrote to manage the single page application sections. I also began to study a little bit of data science and plotting with matplotlib and used that to write an awesome year end summary in LaTeX.

These skills sort of moved all over the place, but I basically did a slow build up from an idea that I had last year. I was tired of trying to track things across different Excel pages and knew that a database would be a more elegant solution. I progressively built a web application that could cleanly represent my data and motivate me to progress quickly to my savings goals. Currently the site inputs and updates expenses, tracks budgets, retrieves savings and net worth numbers, and charts out growth. I can filter queries and easily navigate through the main functions.

On top of that, I can proudly say that I wrote all the front end code for this website by hand (including the CSS) to eliminate any calls to outside libraries like Bootstrap. The back end is Python that uses Flask to serve the application and feeds off business logic that I wrote for a command line version of the budgeting software. All this is self-hosted on my Fedora desktop and served through an NGINX web server.

I will continue to build features onto this site throughout 2023. The primary thing I’m missing is a nice way to check on my investment data within the web app. I think that I will be able to build out a few pages that either track what I already have at the beginning of each month, or potentially log into the sites and scrape my investment data into the app. I’ll take a break at the beginning of the year, but will probably hit the ground running on that in February.

I would love to upload this project to my GitHub page, but due to the sensitive nature of financial data I have been reluctant to do that for fear that I left some major identifying information in the code. I will be attempting to go through and clean my git repo so that this can be made public. There are other projects that can do this better; but I have learned a lot while implementing this and it fits my needs nicely.

Books

I’ve read 13 books and wrote up 3 posts with notes and quotes! I’ll link those here and then post my impressions of a few of the others that I learned a good deal from. I highly recommend The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel as I think everybody can get a lot out of it. Plus its a fairly quick read.

  1. Napoleon: A Life - Andrew Roberts
  2. Ender’s Game - Orson Scott Card
  3. Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World - Jack Weatherford
  4. Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens
  5. Dune - Frank Herbert
  6. Verity - Colleen Hoover
  7. China: A History - John Keay
  8. Starship Troopers - Robert Heinlein
  9. Psychology of Money - Morgan Housel
    • Good stories about how to be more successful in personal finances by staying the course and recognizing that some people or industries just get lucky. Long term investing is the surest path to success and you need to save just for unexpected life events, not necessarily only for big purchases.
  10. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
  11. Outliers: The Story of Success - Malcolm Gladwell
    • Success is tough to achieve just by hard work alone. Most of the extremely successful people in the world had very unusual circumstances that put them in positions to be the best at something right when it was necessary. There is not much to do to control that. But it also points out that the people you surround yourself with are very likely to have a large impact on your standing in the world.
  12. A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking
    • Stunning overview of very complicated math and science in an easily digestable format. This is an inspiration to start looking into those tough problems with a new lens about how they all fit together into grand theories of the universe.
  13. Thinking Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman

Random

I have also spent a fair amount of time listening to a few podcasts that interest me. Sticking with the theme of finances, I love the Rational Reminder podcast and try to listen to each episode as they come out weekly. I also fit in a few episodes of Hardcore History by Dan Carlin. They are longer shows, but packed with tons of information and tell history in a way that you usually can’t get from anywhere else unless you want to read textbooks all day.

I’ve also read the Wall Street Journal (almost daily), Foreign Affairs, The Economist (in the last quarter of the year), and a few articles from the US Naval Institute Proceedings. Next year, I am going to cut down on the newspapers and magazines that I read in order to fit in more books. Aiming for 23 in 2023 after inspiration from the folks at the Rational Reminder podcast.

Wrap Up

That is basically a summary of my year in learning for 2022. I tried to get up and learn something new each week. There are lots of little lessons in there that I learned throughout as well, but not everything merits a comment on this blog. I plan to keep pushing myself further next year. The one area where I didn’t take much advantage of my time was keeping this site up to date. I will try to get better with that and may post some smaller articles about simple topics as how-to references for myself and anybody else who happens to stumble on these notes. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or recommendations for things that I can take a look at. Always looking for new knowledge!