DEV Community: Nelson Bermeo

Personal Finance Tracker with Python

Nelson Bermeo — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 11:24:24 +0000

Intro:
Morning! Another simple project under my belt and could be under yours! With the tutorial guidance of Tim from Tech with Tim at: Youtube Link I was able to program a personal finance tracker. This project used a csv file to store transactions from the terminal line with pandas and uses matplotlib to plot the data for you to see. This is a great project for python beginners looking to explore popular libraries!

Project:
The program prompts users to enter transaction details such as date, amount, category (Income or Expense), and description, which are then stored in a CSV file. Users can view a summary of their income, expenses, and net savings for any given period, and generate plots to see trends and patterns in their financial data.

The project was both challenging and rewarding. Validating user inputs to ensure data integrity, handling CSV files for data storage, and creating meaningful visualizations were some of the key tasks. This experience highlighted the importance of robust input validation, efficient data handling, and the power of data visualization in understanding financial habits.

To Do:
This project and concept is a great base to make something bigger! Ideas I can think of is making a simple GUI that implements the original functions, or perhaps creating a django site. You could add more functionalities. The sky's the limit.

Lesson:
Following projects is a great tool for learning, but working on your own idea or building off an idea yourself is equally important. I will work off this project and be back to share my creation. In addition, following these projects are crucial for building a greater computer science background and experience. I plan to learn about webscraping, ai chatbots, and django with youtube. Following different topics through videos extends your knowledge a ton and can allow you to start thinking of ways to connect them all. Youtube is the best.

Thank you for reading. Thanks again to Tim from Tech with Tim. The repo for this project can be found here GitHub Link

Nelson Bermeo
Computer Science Sophomore
Stevens Institute of Technology
Email: nbermeo@stevens.edu
LinkedIn
Personal Website
Github

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https://www.udemy.com/course/cpp-data-structures-algorithms-prateek-narang/?couponCode=LETSLEARNNOWPP

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Nelson Bermeo — Sat, 29 Jun 2024 22:13:25 +0000

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https://www.udemy.com/course/deep-learning-machine-learning-practical/?couponCode=LETSLEARNNOWPP

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Machine Learning Specialization Review

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How To Build A Cool Portfolio Website

Nelson Bermeo — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 18:38:23 +0000

What?

Morning! (Not an ad, or a course) Looking to code up your own portfolio website with zero experience? Well, I’ve done it before, and I’ll tell you all about it to make your process simpler than mine was. If you ever need help with anything, just contact me. My website is nelsonbermeo.com. I used Next.js, React, and TypeScript. This post is for people who want a stunning portfolio website built in a day. Take my advice lightly since I'm not a web developer, but I was able to create a personal site.

The Scene

It’s the Summer between my freshman and sophomore years, and all I know about computer science is math and data structures. So, looking at JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and other components was a bit daunting. But I took up the challenge because I wanted a cool website to express myself.

The Process

Your most important tools are going to be YouTube tutorials, ChatGPT, and GitHub. I followed this tutorial on YouTube by JavaScript Mastery: How to Build a Portfolio Website. Then, I added my own spin on it by borrowing code from other GitHub pages and using ChatGPT a lot.
So, yeah, I followed the tutorial exactly. This 2-hour video took me like 7 hours because I had to pause every second and copy the code down. After a while, I realized I could just copy the repo from GitHub and install the libraries needed, but if I did that, I wouldn’t have learned how to edit the website myself.
After following the tutorial to the tea (is that the phrase?), I started to add components that weren’t directly from the tutorial. Without a guide, a lot of errors fell on my head. But that’s okay! Just ask ChatGPT—they’ll point you in the right direction.
I looked on the YouTuber’s discord server, and luckily, this guy named Rohit Rai posted his own twist on the site with cool additions that I added to my project. I copy-pasted some code, and then I understood how to add effects by copying Aceternity’s source code for an effect, creating a component, and making it my own. Just know that if you follow the tutorial, adding your own Aceternity component will be so easy. Copying components from other repos will be easy to understand after you finish the tutorial.
PS: Ignore the Sentry thing the YouTuber was talking about if you want—I didn’t use it, and my site worked fine.
The final task was hosting the website on the real internet. I don’t know if there is a free way to do this on GitHub Pages, but I was able to host the site on Hostinger for $40 a year. I followed this tutorial: How to Host Your Website. PS: The confetti did not work for me.

Takeaway

Projects are so fun. I was glued to my screen for 4 days doing this and actually learned a great deal about web development. I found my way to learn, and it could be yours too. I always prepared to do instead of actually doing something. I took HTML courses and CSS courses and took notes the whole time, which made me finish the course very slowly. Even during CS246 Data Structures, I noted the algorithms but never implemented them by heart. Only when I actively learned and found patterns in projects did I learn effectively. Referring to notes did not work for me—learning from experience did, and I hope the same will follow when I learn NumPy, Pandas, etc. I could write down every NumPy function, or I can repeatedly do projects that use NumPy and realize the workflow and pattern.
Oh, and if you’re pursuing a topic in class, don’t just ChatGPT it. Ask the professor, a teaching assistant, or a classmate. It helps you actually learn the topic, and it’s pretty fun to talk. Plus you can’t spell cheating without the heat that’d you’d get yourself into.

Contact

If you have any questions or need any help, you can email me at nbermeo@stevens.edu or nelsonberm.2005@gmail.com. Or you can visit me at my office hours at [tbd]. But, if there are students there that need help with work for the class I’m teaching assisting, then I’ll have to ignore you until I’m done helping them. Or!!! Come to CS CLUB Wednesdays at Gateway South [tbd] 9:15!!
!

Interest Python Project

Nelson Bermeo — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 21:29:40 +0000

https://github.com/Melson12/Final_Interest_Project

What am I doing?

Hello, my name is Nelson Bermeo a college freshman at Stevens Institute of Technology. Computer Science and it's many sectors interest me greatly. I'd often get a jolt of excitement everytime I remember how much information is avaliable for me to learn online. I can create many things on my local machine... cool things.

I am going through the Computer Science course from CodeAcademy and this is my first portfolio project. It is very simple, but I believe it demonstrates very important traits of a programmer.

The Project

My project is a terminal game that explains the user different types of interest equations. The user is greeted by a text explaing the premise and then asked which type of interest they would like to learn about. The user would type in their choice and get some information about that interest. They'd then have the opportunity to choose a starting amount for a set of variables and gain a look at the years of money incrementation in a list. Then the user would be allowed to type in another interest choice to look at.

What I learned

This was actually my first project ever. It took a lot of time for me to gain my knowledge. First of all I had to complete all the python courses in the "Programming" section of the CS course. I utilized list comprehension and for loops in this project. In addition I watched a git version control tutorial on youtube to learn how to use git. I was able to commit changes as I went, change branches and learn but not utilize requests.

Conclusion

I loved working on this project and hope that my next project will gain me even more knowledge for my future. Only going up from here!