Real World Ledger part 1: Weighing Eggs in Baskets

Do you ever feel like you’re losing grip on your personal finances? You deposit into your savings account in one currency, buy stocks and bonds in another, and maybe even hodl on to some cryptocurrency. You keep a finger on the pulse and occasionally check your assets’ value, but volatile prices and exchange rates make it challenging. Ledger is a command-line accounting tool that addresses these issues. In this post I’ll introduce you to it.

Sidestepping Heroku's limits with PostgreSQL 9.5's UPSERT

My roommate needed help with building a web scraper. As a result of various constraints, we ended up using Heroku. There was, however, a database row limit that we had to work around. It turned out to be a nice opportunity to play with the new PostgreSQL 9.5 INSERT ... ON CONFLICT DO UPDATE, also known as UPSERT, functionality. The goal of this article is to introduce UPSERT to you via a practical example.

Visualizing 24 hours of medical students cramming anatomy

tl;dr: in the first year of medical school, I built an application that helps fellow students and myself with studying anatomy. The answers of the last exam, submitted by students while revising, have been visualized with Gource. Please check out the YouTube video for the result: img

Building a GeoJSON travel log: an introduction to Org mode and Babel

Literate programming is a technique that caught my attention after recently stumbling upon Howard Abrams’ ‘Literate Devops with Emacs’ video. The intersection of watching this awesome video, reading about GeoJSON rendering on GitHub and returning from a road trip last summer led me to building my own travel log. In my first blog post I would like to show you how it works.