Tracking Personal Finances using Python

As the title says, the book is now included in the Pragmatic Programmers catalog!

They have a reputation of having a high-quality selection of programmer-focused books. So being included in their catalog is not only an honor, but also a signal for me that the book is interesting for a larger audience.

They've been a joy to work with, and the publication process was fairly straight-forward. I had to send them the book artifacts (manuscript, cover page, etc.) and they took care of the rest.

The ebook hit the $1000 milestone this morning!

Most of the sales came as a result of a blog post I wrote (on my personal blog) where I linked to the ebook's website.

This blog post was essentially a TL;DR of the ebook. My idea there was to give a potential reader a taste of what they'll be getting if they buy the ebook.

Looking back, I'd definitely say the idea worked out. I submitted this post to Hacker News where it hit the front page for a few hours. I also cross-posted the contents to the DEV community which brought in a bunch of more traffic (and sales). But the majority was definitely a result of the HN traffic.

Very happy with the results so far!

I made the first sale on Gumroad 🥳

On that day I was out hiking and received the notification email just a few minutes after reaching the top. So I was literally on top of a mountain when the sale happened. 😅

Interestingly, I haven't had a chance to promote the link yet. So this sale was organic. 🤯

Next steps: I'll send an early-access discount code to the mailing list. Also plan to write some related content on the site and maybe get in touch with a few Python newsletters.

In any case, tiny but exciting win!

I finalized the e-book's landing page.

In terms of design, I decided to keep it simple. Partly because I'm not a designer so I wouldn't know how to do fancy designs. But partly also because I'm generally a fan of stuff that's simple and minimal. It also helps that Bootstrap defaults seem to work really well for simple pages like this.

After spending a ton of evenings and weekends writing this e-book, I was finally able to finish the first draft and submit it to an editor for review!

I strongly believe one should be able to track their personal finances using open-source technologies. This applies particularly to developers who use such technologies on a daily basis.

I'm aware that there are a ton of multi-banking apps on the market that solve this problem. And I don't have anything against any of them! But personally speaking, the fact that all my financial data lives in some place which is not under my control makes me a bit uneasy.

A few years ago I discovered the world of plain-text accounting and have been using it ever since to track my own expenses. It took a bit of trial and error to get things running. But now that I have a working system, I wanted to teach others to not run into the same walls as I did.

Super curious about the feedback the editor will have!