Felix Crux

Technology & Miscellanea

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When trying to budget or understand regular baseline spending, special events like travel or large one-off purchases can distort the picture. Fortunately, ledger's tagging system allows us to report on these transactions separately, giving us better insight both into everyday expenses and the real cost of unusual events.

(This post is part of a series describing how I use the Ledger accounting system. For an introduction to ledger and this series, or to see all the entries, have a look at the first post).

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Instead of typing out the same half-dozen options every time you want a ledger report, you can define them once up front in a .ledgerrc file. This does make it annoying when you don't want those specific options, but there are ways around that.

(This post is part of a series describing how I use the Ledger accounting system. For an introduction to ledger and this series, or to see all the entries, have a look at the first post).

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The Ledger accounting system is a powerful (but not very easy to adopt) software tool for double-entry bookkeeping. It can be used for far more than just basic finances: tracking billable hours, calculating taxes and tithes, reporting on the asset class balance of your investment portfolio… almost anything you can think of — if you can figure out how to do it.

Most of the information I could find just presented a basic overview of the simplest possible use of the tool. The official documentation, on the other hand, is very comprehensive, but it's like being given a pile of logs and some nails when you're trying to find out how to build a house.

I therefore will be writing up a series of posts on “Ledger Practices”, describing how I actually use the system for intermediate-complexity personal accounting. These should be “recipes” for solving real problems or answering real questions using ledger.

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Tickets to PyCon Canada 2016 are now available, and will be on a discounted “early bird” price until Monday the 19th. The main event will be on November 12th and 13th in downtown Toronto, followed by development sprints that are open to the public on the 14th and 15th.

Although PyCon is built around the Python community, the content is not usually hyper-specific to Python: there are always plenty of general interest topics that any developer can benefit from. You can also view recordings of talks from previous years.

Sadly I was't able to help out at the event this year, so advertising for it is the least I could do! And, of course, I will be attending.

Do also note that the event is still looking for more sponsors, so if you'd like to support a very beloved local tech event, check out their prospectus and send them an email!