I’ve been working on an expense tracking app called Budgies (named after a burrito restaurant in my neighborhood). The idea came from a conversation with my close friend and colleague Jamshid, who suggested that I track my expenses to better understand where my money was going and set a budget so I could feel less guilty about spending as long as I stayed within budget. I started by downloading my bank and credit card statements and generating parsers to extract transactions from CSV/PDF files.
My Favorite Spots in Toronto
I’ve been wanting to create a map that I can share with friends when they ask for recommendations. As I was curating this list, I realized that the places I like aren’t necessarily the ones with the best food or drinks. I like small businesses, spots that have local regulars and where I had good memories with people. These places are personal to me and you can read more about each in the notes I added on the map https://sungatae.
Freelancing
As part of my 11 projects in 11 months initiative, I worked on a freelance project for the past couple of weeks. I initially declined because freelancing defeated the purpose of this initiative, which was to work on my own projects, but I ended up taking the project for a couple of reasons: The client validated the idea. It was addressing a problem his team was having at work and he also found out other companies were experiencing this problem.
11 Projects in 11 Months
My goal of the year is to build a new project every month. This is something I’ve been wanting to do for many years after watching Pieter Levels’ talk, but I didn’t dare to try it while working full-time. Now that AI has made it much easier to write code, I decided there’s no better time than now to start. I’m going to publish the projects here no matter how good or bad they turn out, so stay tuned!
DJing
Ever since my college roommates took me to my first EDM show in sophomore year, I’ve been a fan of electronic music and have gone to many shows and festivals where I danced my ass off and made great memories with friends. I grew to admire DJs who play just the right song at the right time to keep the energy pumping and take the crowd on a journey.
I made a mobile app. Meet Billy!
Let me introduce you to Billy! Billy is an app that helps you split bills with your friends. Once you upload a photo of your receipt, Billy scans it and gives you a simple UI to assign items to each person. At the end, it provides a clear breakdown for each person that you can easily share with your friends. The app is only available on the App Store for now, but I plan to release it for Android soon.
Book: The Perks of Being a Wallflower
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky I remember going to the theater with my friends to watch the movie adapation when it first came out in 2012. At the time, I didn’t understand why my friends who read the novel were so excited to watch it, but now I do because I loved reading every part of this book. One morning, while reading the book, I suddenly felt alive as if I hadn’t been born until that moment.
Magnetic Poetry
In our literature classroom in high school, there used to be a wall with magnetic word pieces that you could use to make poems. It was called Magnetic Poetry and I remember we had so much fun writing weird poems. I recently came across this photo and thought it would be fun to have one at home too. I breathe hard when we bathe ferociously at night with your manly father and sister & brother but it is a secret never ask y we did it So I purchased one last week and put it up on the metallic cover of my fan coil unit.
Instagram Archive (ig.sungatae.com)
One downside of quitting Instagram is that there’s no easy way to look back at my posts. It feels like I’ve lost a chapter of my life since it was where I used to share life updates. To preserve those memories, I decided to upload photos and videos from Instagram to my own domain. As the title suggests, I intend to treat it as an archive so I won’t be uploading any new posts there.
My First Marathon
I ran my first marathon at Niagara Falls two Sundays ago. When I started running at the beginning of last year, I never thought I would run a marathon. I ran simply because I wanted to get better at soccer. In fact, I never liked running growing up because it was boring and tiring. But this time was different. I was still tired, but I felt good after my runs. It helped me clear my mind.