heidi2o

Weeknote 6 - a Low-fi Personal Finance App and return of the Reading List

7 min read

I’ve been on vacation this week and spent most of it being at the beck and call of Mishka. She requires a minimum of 7.5 hours of snuggles a day. There will be a lot of displeased screaming next week when I return home from the office.

Mishka looking majestic and unimpressed
Mishka looking majestic and unimpressed

This week, I am introducing some more consistent structure to these notes with the Bookmarked This Week section below. to lower the effort to produce a weekly note, saving writing original content for when I actually have something to say. Plus, I did want this space to be more of a digital garden1 and having all my original writing crammed into notes arbitrarily divided by dates doesn’t really enable the networked/hypertext sprawl I originally envisioned.

Bookmarked This Week

To elaborate further, the original purpose of my now defunct Substack2 was to have one central place to put everything I bookmark to read, am currently obsessed with, and usually share with people one by one or community by community. Basically a digest of the things I’m keeping an eye as part of my ongoing environmental scan and the other things I use to overshare about on my other defunct social media3. I realized that since I migrated over to my own space, I really have been focused on epistolary writing. Recently, my perfectionism has been triggered by my struggles in French class4 and it’s spilling over. I started to feel myself overthinking the content of these notes as well.

  1. Sophia Sparke’s post about her interactive data offerings for events: Think of me when you want your data event to be hands-on.Stickers and badges and data drawing, oh my!Data badges. Live data portraits. Interactive sticker charts. I make the stuff that turns… | Sophie Sparkes

  2. Three papers shared by Teaching Public Service in the Digital Agecommunity:

  3. Estonia’s Chief Data Officer’s LinkedIn post on Estonia’s AI technical & regulatory sandbox: AI sandbox | Ott Velsberg | 24 comments

  4. Catherine D’Ignazio’s (Data + Feminism Lab, MIT) first draft Technofasism quiz: The Technofascist Technology Quiz | by Catherine D’Ignazio (she/ella) | Data + Feminism Lab, MIT | Feb, 2026 | Medium

  5. This paper Limitations of the Linnaean categorization model in the age of AI | Cambridge Forum on AI: Culture and Society | Cambridge Core which digs into the history of rigid hierarchies and fixed labels, their lasting impacts on how we think about everything now, and specifically AI, arguing that a “new classification built on multiplicity, relationality, and cultural context, rather than fixed schemas” is necessary to enable meaning to be gleaned from relationships rather than derived from predetermined labels.

  6. Canadian Open Data Directory by the Canadian Open Data Society.

  7. PolicyEngine Presentationshared by the founder of PolicyEngine, Max Ghenis on “Building state capacity through open source policy simulation”.

  8. This paper on “Making Integrity Visible”, arguing that “Government decisions affect millions of Australians. But if you cannot see how those decisions are made, how do you know they were made properly?”

  9. A conference5 connect, Aurélie Petit, shared that her work was AI porn isn’t regulated. What does that mean for depictions of queer bodies?

Miscellaneous Updates

Finance-dash

Zan has been trying for a while to get us to be much more aware of our finances, particularly as we make longer term plans for our life. We both have limited spoons and executive dysfunction though so a major criteria was for it to be extremely low effort both in building in the first place and for maintenance over time. So there’s no user interface at all, just a script that I run in command line after copying and pasting in a csv.

A screenshot of the lo-fi personal finance app made using Dash, displaying dummy data
A screenshot of the lo-fi personal finance app made using Dash, displaying dummy data

So here’s the code for this little vacation project, built using the Dash framework: GitHub - heidiwwang/finance-dash: low effort dashboard to visualize personal finance · GitHub

I will iterate it overtime, but won’t be putting much time into documentation or any type of user interface so approach at your own risk if you aren’t familiar with Python and the various libraries used.

Donating Blood and Plasma

If it’s not already on your radar, let’s give some blood this year.

A colleague’s wife passed recently after an prolonged battle with cancer. Access to donated blood was critical to their last weeks. The family is encouraging blood donation to your relevant local organization (eg. Canadian Blood Services).

I am myself a carrier of an inherited blood disorder, Hemophilia, the treatment of which heavily relied on the availability and access to (safe6) blood and plasma supply for transfusions and factor VIII concentrates. The latter until very recently could only be derived from donated plasma. Hence, I echo the sentiment and will commit to going to donate blood and plasma once7 in the upcoming year.

GC Data Conference and Government Innovation Showcase

Do conference organizers intentionally book dates to be close together or do the dates naturally attract each other? Either way I’m glad I had a week off after 2 weeks of high demand conferences in a row. It was a great time to debut the newest addition to my conference attendance kit:

Data Friendship Bracelets!

A list of ideas to help make your own Data Friendship Bracelet Ideas. Come find me for one at the next event data/digital transformation/government innovation/govTech event.

Four friendship bracelets with the text: Talk Data to me, open by default, c’est la viz and I ❤️ open data
Four friendship bracelets with the text: Talk Data to me, open by default, c’est la viz and I ❤️ open data

Josh Johnson’s Comedy Band Camp

I got tickets to see Josh Johnson in Ottawa on June 13 at 8pm! I’m very excited about this. I love hearing him tell stories so much I often just have his sets running in the background. The last time he was in Ottawa, I found out about it several week after it already happened, so this time I was checking almost daily.

It is on the same day as Gov Action Cafe… so I think a few (dozen) espressos will be needed this day.

Footnotes

  1. Networked Thought by Jack Zhao who created Quartz 4which is what I use to generate this site out of my Obsidianvault ↩

  2. You Should Probably Leave Substack | How to Leave Substack. tldr: Nazis. ↩

  3. See everything branded under “booksandcables”: Heidi (@booksandcables) • Instagram photos and videos ↩

  4. I got a 90% on my French end of module exam on my second try. I am genuinely baffled about what made the difference between the first and second exam that made that one 85% vs this one 90%. But at least I get to progress to the next module. There’s still the issue of … actually preparing for my SLE but… that’s I guess a later problem. ↩

  5. One of my favourite conferences ever, Shaping AI for Just Futures | Research and innovation; playlist of recordings: Shaping AI for Just Futures: AI + Society International Conference - YouTube ↩

  6. Commemoration of the Tainted Blood Tragedy - Hemophilia; 2 Paths of Bayer Drug in 80’s: Riskier One Steered Overseas - The New York Times: “But in Hong Kong and Taiwan alone, more than 100 hemophiliacs got H.I.V. after using Cutter’s old medicine, according to records and interviews. Many have since died. Cutter also continued to sell the older product after February 1984 in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Japan and Argentina, records show.” ↩

  7. I have been rejected for iron deficiency in the past so I can’t really set a higher goal. ↩

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