# coding

I tried tracking my expenses with an Excel sheet for a few months and it worked as long as I was diligent. I even installed Excel on my iPhone. Some days I was able to document each purchase as soon as it was made; on other days multiple small purchases piled up over several days, so eventually I had to spend a lot of time going back and forth between the Excel sheet and my banking app, deciphering transactions. So I went looking for an app that could make this whole job easier. I tried a few from the recommendations and all of them allowed detailed tracking of personal expenses, "buckets," and other cool stuff that felt advanced. Most of these apps had appealing design, looked polished and inviting. However, none of them removed that manual friction point — either...

I was going to build a Telegram bot that would check content of this WordPress page every day and post short excerpts of new posts to my Telgram channel. First I was gonna use a cloud service that would run checks regularly and trigger necessary actions. Then I decided to build a WordPress plugin for this purpose. Plugins in WordPress can have cron jobs so that made perfect sense.

A few hours later the first version of the plugin, built in Cursor, was tested in production. It runs a check every day at some point to look for new posts. When any post(s) found – it posts link(s) to my non artificial intelligence channel, and if there are no new posts – it generates a short poetic message describing the weather in Stockholm in poetic terms.

I have been hearing this advice from multiple practitioners: when learning programming, work on a project, don’t just do courses. Doing courses is good, while you are learning new stuff, but to get hands-on experience you need to build something tangible and something on your own. And of course there are always tons of ideas for what can be built. At the same time I have been (for a long time now) struggling with my (almost abandoned) Telegram channel called non-artificial intelligence. I barely post there and any new post comes like once in a year. So I guess it would be brilliant to build a bridge between this site and my Telegram channel. Not only would this service mirror links to new posts here, it could also generate something new each day with ChatGPT when I do nothing. It...

The first programming language that I heard of was Delphi. One of the neighbours studied computer science and it was the primary language that they used. However, during their first year, they learned Turbo Pascal and this was his recommendation to start with. In some way unknown to me I got fascinated by the lines of code that harmonically composed a program and made computer to perform different things. So, finding an old book on Turbo Pascal at a flea market, I started following it through. I advanced to half of the book, when along the way I lost focus. Building a calculator was cool, but it was still too far away from all the cool things that nurtured my initial interest. I was also afraid of all the difficult types of math that my neighbour was telling me about....

I remember seeing Delphi for the first time and thinking how cool it is to “create UI with buttons and texts”. It was an older neighbour that did Bachelor’s in Computer Science who showed me. It was as well him who recommended me to study Turbo Pascal 7.0 which is “easy to start with”.

So I bought the book on some flea market. And started iterating through. I remember building a simple calculator, being able to perform simple arithmetic operations. That was cool — to see something being built by you, something that you create.