Overview

This documentation aims to give an overview of the project nami. This project is meant for my personal use to track my daily expenses. I am currently using google sheets to track my expenses on a daily basis. Based on the data, I aim to figure out and observe my expense habits and records any sort of pattern if I have any over a long term. Today marks a solid one year practice of this habit and till now, it has been immensely helpful to review my expense records without manually going through my bank statements. Also since I have more than one bank account, it is practically a frustrating and cumbersome process if I need to review my expenses over this period of time. Hence in order to make things simpler, I started using google sheets for the tracking. Now as the next step, this project aims to build an application for this use case.

What/why do I intend to achieve ?

I have a very specific and simple use case and outcome that I expect from this project. What matters to me right now with regard to this project can be categorized into two parts. First, I simply need a clean, easily accessible UI to get all the expense amounts done over the period of time, shown to me on a daily and monthly basis by default over a period of a year. Additionally, I hope to be able to customize the UI by adding filters based on date as a future scope of this project to make it more easy to navigate without depending on any specific bank website or server. Secondly, I want to visualize the data as a column chart on a daily and monthly basis. Additionally, as time goes by, my data will naturally increase and may be one day, I would be able to figure out a pattern based on it.

As a result, I intend to not only easily track my expense records but also make personal financial decisions based on it and if possible be prepared for upcoming expenses without putting much effort in manually calculating and planning for future expenses. I expect to get a rough idea on my spending habits and make better decisions to minimize useless expenditure. This effort also aims to solve a personal issue of bad financial habits, due to which I have already suffered in the past and I believe this is my way of taking a first step towards not repeating my mistakes over and over again. I strongly believe that with my will and commitment, I would be able to instill financial discipline in myself and have no doubts whatsoever that it is for a greater good for me, my friends and family. Fundamentally, I never ever, and I seriously mean NEVER EVER would be in a situation like in 2023 in my life again from a financial point of view. End of the day, what is important is to cover my basic necessity of having food on table, being able to afford atleast two meals a day and a shelter to sleep and energy to work harder everyday and not bother absolutely no-one for these fundamental needs. Not only it is embarrassing at a personal level but also it is an ethical crime for me to be so financially naïve and undisciplined.

What is the series about?

The series intends to help me record down my learnings and experience of this journey and one day when I will achieve it in the upcoming future, I will review the journey for my mistakes in thought process so that it I will learn and grow and try my best to not repeat the same mistakes in my next journey and so on.

This series will specifically focus on my thought process of building nami from scratch to cater to my needs. I will cover the technical aspects as well in this series everything from architecture, choice of technology, code philosophies, difficulties I face during the journey and justify why I am doing things in a certain way.

The code would be obviously be public on GitHub and I will continuously share the update in my twitter account as well because I would like to try to learn and grow in public as suggested by so many tech-influencers, so this is my way of taking this advice and moving forward I sincerely hope to achieve the objective of improving myself whilst learning and growing as software engineer and may be helping someone out in the world who is or have gone through this kind of thinking in any way.