Alright, let me tell you about this thing I was messing around with the other day – Paul Manziel. Yeah, the name sounds kinda weird, but stick with me.
So, it all started when I was trying to figure out a better way to manage my personal finances. I’m talking budgeting, tracking expenses, the whole shebang. I was using a bunch of different apps and spreadsheets, and it was just a total mess. I needed something streamlined, something that actually made sense to my brain.
I started digging around online, looking for some inspiration. I stumbled across a couple of articles talking about creating your own financial tracking system using Python. Now, I’m not a programmer by any means, but I know a little bit of Python from some online courses I took ages ago. I figured, why not give it a shot?
First thing I did was install Python on my machine. Had to google how to do that, ’cause I totally forgot. Then I grabbed a text editor – VS Code, if you’re curious. Figured that’s what all the cool kids use.
Okay, so then I started sketching out what I wanted this “Paul Manziel” thing to do. Basically, I wanted to be able to:
Input my income from various sources.
Track my expenses, categorized by type (rent, food, entertainment, etc.).
See a monthly summary of my income and expenses.
Maybe even do some basic forecasting.
I started with the income part. I just created a simple Python script that prompted me to enter my income for the month. I stored that value in a variable. Easy peasy.
Then came the expenses. This was a bit trickier. I decided to use a dictionary to store my expenses, with the category names as keys and the amounts as values. So, something like:
expenses = {
"rent": 1200,
"food": 400,
"entertainment": 100
I wrote some code to let me add new expenses to the dictionary, and also update existing ones. I also added a function to calculate the total expenses for the month. Things were starting to take shape!
Next up was the monthly summary. I wrote some code to print out my total income, total expenses, and the difference between the two. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked. I was able to see at a glance where my money was going.
The forecasting part was a bit ambitious, and honestly, I didn’t get very far with it. I was thinking about using some kind of simple linear regression model to predict future expenses based on past data, but I quickly realized that was way over my head. Maybe I’ll tackle that later.
Now, “Paul Manziel” isn’t some fancy, polished app. It’s just a bunch of Python scripts that I run from the command line. But you know what? It actually works for me. It’s tailored to my specific needs, and it helps me keep track of my finances in a way that makes sense to me.
The biggest challenge? Remembering the Python syntax! I was constantly googling how to do basic things like read input from the user or iterate over a dictionary. But hey, that’s part of the learning process, right?
If I were to do it again, I’d probably spend more time planning out the data structure upfront. I kinda just jumped right in, and I ended up having to refactor my code a couple of times as I went along. But all in all, it was a fun and rewarding experience. I learned a lot about Python, and I now have a (somewhat) functional personal finance tracker that I built myself.
So, yeah, that’s the story of Paul Manziel. Maybe it’ll inspire you to try building something yourself!
