Another Monday rolls around, a first one in March, and suddenly everyone is thinking the same thing: next month I have to pay taxes.
As I’ve blogged about several times over the years, I get interviewed by a tax professional after I’ve retrieved and summarized the year’s documents. This year is no different, other than I have developed more of a system. My wife was a professional bookkeeper so I used to leave the accounting all to her, but twenty years later, I’m not that helpless.
What I do is what everyone who has bank accounts or stuff like PayPal or crypto wallets does:
- generate statements for the entire year, showing all transactions, both in and out;
- iterate over all such accounts (we think of iterators in Python, an umbrella type).
- Then I filter out the business expenses and
- offset those against business income to keep my taxes that of a small business (which it is).
What do I do for a living? You may have attended some of my lectures, online, asynchronously, or even in person over the years at a Pycon or OSCON or one of these (even a Djangocon in Chicago).
I put myself down as a teacher and writer (what kind of writing? A lot of it is curriculum development — echoes of my job at McGraw-Hill back in the 1980s).
I do both with or without income deriving therefrom (gig economy). For example, last year around this same time I was working for bosses based closer to Eastern Europe than to Japan, just to make a Where in the World Carmen Sandiego clue out of it.
Speaking of kid games (computer games for kids), I dusted off an old Codesters account from my Coding with Kids chapter, and was gratified to find my curated projects (not all by me I don’t think) still working. I wonder if any of my students have anything curated. I had a teacher account.
Codesters came after MIT Scratch in our sequence. All our curriculum stations were cloud based, even if the classes were in person, until the virus hit, the pandemic, at which point we started summer camps over Zoom.
As people were recovering from the pandemic, I found myself back in the classroom, this time with just the one school, not a school-serving company.
Working with various concepts on up the ladder, starting high, going low (to beginner), back up to a summit and so on, repeatedly, is a great way to get a mature picture of the landscape, so to speak. Which landscape is always changing.
One can’t help but be out of date on various topics. We get our updates asynchronously, that’s just how it is. There’s an entry under Doppler Effect that’s reminiscent.
