I keep confessing my love for technology.
So, a couple of years ago I couldn’t put together even the simplest Telegram bot. The moment it came to deploying stuff or touching server-related nonsense, I’d hit problems that were basically un-Googleable. Writing code was at least manageable — you could google errors, copy-paste random bits from StackOverflow without understanding a thing, and sometimes it even worked. But servers? Different story. Every time I tried fixing an error blindly, it only spawned new ones, and digging into the actual cause was way too much hassle for my very amateur projects.
Two years ago — November 2023 — I finally wrote a bot in Java and, with the help of Anya (whose patience is nothing short of heroic) and ChatGPT, managed to deploy it. At the time it felt like a breakthrough! By the way, I went with Java simply because Telegram’s docs had the most detailed step-by-step guide for it.
In the years since, I’ve launched a handful of little bots here and there. Most of them were useless from a product perspective, but they taught me how to write code by just setting a task for the machine and reading whatever came out on the other side. Still, I constantly struggled with tools built “for developers by developers.” Like, how the hell are you supposed to figure out Google Cloud auth parameters without a bottle of vodka? And how do you make sure it won’t suddenly charge you a fortune?
The real revolution (for me) happened around ChatGPT-4. Suddenly I could just drop it a screenshot of my settings and go, “yo bruh, where do I click here?” Those questions that were impossible to solve through StackOverflow were suddenly fixed in under a minute.
And recently I rolled out a new project that, I think, will stick around in production for a while, since it actually needs to run on servers. It’s a very minimalist expense tracker. Yeah, yeah, I know — every third side project is an expense tracker. Don’t worry, next time I’ll make something really original. Like… a task manager! Anyway, here’s the flow:
- You authorize the bot to access your Google Drive (so it can create a file there and use it later).
- Then you send your expenses to Telegram in this format: cat food / $5 / 22.08.2025 / OTP Bank. They instantly land in a Google Sheet.
- From there, you can build whatever pivot tables and charts you need. Simple and cheap.
Personally, I haven’t tracked my expenses in about five years — I already know my spending levels, they’re below my income, and I can keep myself in check. But now I needed to separate company expenses from personal ones, and that’s just too annoying to do in my head. So this tool was born.
Anyway, if you want to try it, go ahead. Link’s here: http://t.me/budget_in_google_bot