I think bots are a great way of automating your life in fun ways. It's also my new favorite project to suggest to people starting to program, because just a little bit of customizability goes a long way
Tracking mood is great. A simple telegram bot -> a google sheet lets telegram do the mobile/desktop UI and you just control the logic
One overlooked thing is automating financial tracking/categorization. In the US there's no good cross banking api except for email. Almost every credit card, bank, etc can email a receipt (set the minimum amount of alerts to be $0.01). The flowchart for parsing is bank alert -> gmail -> gmail filter by from address adds a label -> google pub sub notices that label and pings a little VPS somewhere -> gmail api -> parse email -> telegram bot
As I type, it sounds complicated but each step is well trod and has tutorials available. Now you have the ability to make custom push notifications for any transaction with < 1 second latency, instead of using the bank app. And it's all under your control. So the telegram bot allows you to categorize those purchases, you can add little notes or put it in categories. The nice thing is instead of looking at the end of the month and having 100+ little purchases and trying to remember if you ate at Starbucks 4 weeks ago, you categorize things as they happen in just a few clicks. And adding a category (one click) at the time implicitly marks the purchase as 'known good', not a suspicious purchase. So you can cross check at the end of the month for purchases you didn't categorize as suspicious.
Tracking mood is great. A simple telegram bot -> a google sheet lets telegram do the mobile/desktop UI and you just control the logic
One overlooked thing is automating financial tracking/categorization. In the US there's no good cross banking api except for email. Almost every credit card, bank, etc can email a receipt (set the minimum amount of alerts to be $0.01). The flowchart for parsing is bank alert -> gmail -> gmail filter by from address adds a label -> google pub sub notices that label and pings a little VPS somewhere -> gmail api -> parse email -> telegram bot
As I type, it sounds complicated but each step is well trod and has tutorials available. Now you have the ability to make custom push notifications for any transaction with < 1 second latency, instead of using the bank app. And it's all under your control. So the telegram bot allows you to categorize those purchases, you can add little notes or put it in categories. The nice thing is instead of looking at the end of the month and having 100+ little purchases and trying to remember if you ate at Starbucks 4 weeks ago, you categorize things as they happen in just a few clicks. And adding a category (one click) at the time implicitly marks the purchase as 'known good', not a suspicious purchase. So you can cross check at the end of the month for purchases you didn't categorize as suspicious.