What program did you write and what programming languages do you know?
you asked and this is going to be long...
it's a program for helping me generate transactions in the right format so they can be included in my plain text accounting files the plain text accounting programs are beancount and several others from that ecosystem, autobean-format is another, but there are others i use too.
the program i wrote will search through my files of transactions and list lots of stock that have not been sold yet. i have some in some accounts going back to the 1990s but in another account i've been doing more short term things because it is tax free Roth account and i use LIFO so it is not always easy and quick to search back through the file to get the correct lot information i needed. so writing a program which displays only the current available lots and the information i needed was a help, but then now i can also specify that i am Buying, Selling or Splitting (with the Split not being needed at the moment so that is not being worked on yet until i get some other things done). once i put in the line which says what i did then the relevant transaction is spit out, the math is right and the format is right so i can cut and paste from the screen or include the file into my transactions. before i was having to do the searching, math and some formatting all manually. i may not trade a lot, but being somewhat dyslexic and transposing digits can be a problem so having the math done with the right numbers speeds up things for me a great deal and not having to track down math errors can save me a half hour. but i generally check my totals at the end of each session i've changed anything so i'm not normally off by much...
it will also let me sell parts of lots, or more than one lot, or all of the shares i have available, etc. this is not doing anything automatic through the broker though. this is just a program to help me keep my records. by the time i am using the program i need the updated information from the broker which for sells may take a bit as they have to post the amount plus whatever fees they might have charged.
ok, as for programming languages, i've learned many since the early 1980's, being a computer science student at an engineering oriented university and half a master's degree. but most of what i learned were mostly built around Fortran, assembler language of many kinds, Pascal, C, Ada, (two dozens others i never wrote any huge programs in), Smalltalk, plus there are many other scripting or tiny languages like bash (a sh like language), awk and then all the web stuff which i never really cared much to get into, but have had to for my website stuff (html, css, go, ...). add on the database languages like SQL and the screen interface stuff i had to do for work it was often pretty interesting.
the more recent language i've been trying to do more with is Python as it has been around long enough and gotten more stable. i missed most of the drama around version 2 to 3 transition, and now i've gradually done different projects to learn different aspects, but still have a long ways to go.
i need practical projects for things i'm doing to give me enough reasons to spend time on it and each time i learn stuff and then i get into gardening season and forget things so each time i have to go back and relearn and then...
what takes the most time is that i know in my brain exactly what i need to do but then i have to translate through many layers to get to the language i'm working with. what i'm doing now in Python is hard because i don't know it well enough yet so i have to do research and testing of some basic stuff before i nail it down. in C i could write it out knowing exactly what i was doing and had a lot more control and i had tools which did what i wanted. and then there are problems in my thinking because Python is not Smalltalk. in college courses it was not unusual to have to write large complex programs and C was often the language of choice. writing a multi-cpu simulator down to the microcode level was fun, editors, operating system, compilers, all a normal part of what was taught. the web did not exist yet. when the web came around i mostly lost interest as the problems became more distributed and there was no longer the same level of fine control in one place so i retired from that kind of work and went on with my life after spending way too much time dealing with computers.
and then over the years i keep working on a few programs and trying to keep some records, but then i stopped for quite a few years and threw away some papers, and then the past few years i wanted to get back to keeping better track of my accounts so i found beancount and plain text accounting and put as much of my history in as i could find or fudge together (that's taken a few years), but i'm mostly there now so i can answer questions i have and that has been interesting. i still have a few holes in my files here or there that need more work, but i can keep current and that is what i wanted. so i'm sort of there and making things i need to make it easier and so now that it is winter i have a bit more time to do that too.
the biggest part is that i'm getting more demands upon my finances so having better records and history lets me build upon that when i start getting into full retirement incomeland that phases in over the next five years. i've been mostly retired since the mid 90s, but once in a while i have worked part-time if i found a job i was interested in (small town librarian was good until the management changed)...
