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Joined 1 month ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2025

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  • I don’t do budgeting, per-se. For personal expenses, the idea of pre-planning everything we’re going to spend just seems like overkill. Maybe that’s just cause we’re not close enough to the poverty line for real financial hardship. But I find a reactive approach works well, rather than proactive.

    I keep an accounting ledger that I update every 1-2 weeks. The ledger is just a big Excel (actually LibreOffice Calc) file that I setup with some formulas and pie charts to make it easy to see when expenses are outpacing income, and what our biggest expenses are if we need to cut down for a while (spoilers: it’s utilities and food).

    I’ve tried a handful of different free accounting applications in the past, but never found one I liked for the above purposes. I ended up starting a project to make my own, like a year ago, but I haven’t gotten around to finishing it. The spreadsheet approach has been working well enough. All the custom app would do is help automate the data entry.




  • Roughly the same as for any type of software: make shit.

    If you’ve already got experience with general programming, that helps a lot, you can probably just go straight into a super simple game. My go-to recommendation for programming in general is “make simple something that already exists”. That gives you goals that are very clear, and reasonably achievable, so you can start getting some of that satisfaction feedback quickly. For a game, I’d say do something like Tic-Tac-Toe, Battleship, Solitaire… something that isn’t gonna require a whole lot of art, just to get going, and isn’t gonna take weeks to get a working prototype.

    Godot definitely sounds like a good bet to get going. Even if you end up moving to another engine for projects in the future, that doesn’t invalidate your time spent on this one.








  • That’s a perfectly valid approach, yes. We do exactly this, at work. It’s pretty common, if not ubiquitous, to have your database schema consist of not only structure, but data as well. We call it static data, and it’s all defined in deployable scripts, just like our tables and views are. If ISO makes changes to the dataset, then it’s just a table update to match it. And ISO is nice about keeping backwards compatibility inb their standards.

    Since this is not strictly your own data, you could also go with just storing the code value on your tables, and letting the UI layer do the lookup, either with built-in features of your language/framework, or with a static csv file, like you mention. You may not want to do this for static data that is entirely your own, like, say, a status or type enum, since it makes your database schema less-self-descriptive, and more prone to becoming invalid.

    You could also set the country code up as a not-strictly-enforced foreign key, where your app will lookup additional info (E.G. the proper name) for a country code, if it’s a standard one, but just skip that if it’s not a standard one.

    It’s up to you what you think is most appropriate.