Four Hundred Dollars Below Budget

My monthly budgeting follows a strict routine. Every month, my company pays me by transferring funds into Account A. Every month on the 25th, I transfer a thousand dollars into Account B from Account A, and all my personal spending draws from Account B. Now, I don't spend exactly a thousand a month, but it's close enough. Any amount I put in or withdraw from any of my accounts sends a message to my phone.

Yes, I'm a control freak like that. There was a time when I lived from paycheck to paycheck, and it's resulted in certain habits.

So imagine my consternation when recently, before performing my monthly funds transfer into Account B, I looked into Account B and found that there was an extra four hundred dollars just sitting there. Four hundred. Not forty. Where had it come from? None of my notifications showed an incoming transaction by that amount. Was there a bill I'd forgotten to pay? Had the Singapore Government inserted money into my account (some National Budget or other, maybe?) and somehow forgotten to tell me?

I'm rich!!!

People told me I was fretting over nothing. Extra money in your account is a good thing, they said. Better than less money. Just relax and enjoy it.

Utter rubbish. That's the simplistic mentality of laypeople who don't write code for a living.

You see, people tend to focus on the end result, but the process is just as important, if not more. If there is a desirable result and you want to replicate it, it stands to reason that you have to repeat the process under the same conditions. If you don't even know what process should be repeated or the conditions to repeat it under, how are you to replicate that result?

An Example In Code

Here's an example in JavaScript. Say I have two functions, a() and b(). They each accept a parameter, x. Now let me run the function a() using 2 as an argument.

a(2);

Now, if a()'s formula was this...

a(2);

function a(x)
{
    return x * 2;
}

The result would be 4. Because 2 x 2 is 4, right?

4

But what if the formula for b() was this? And then we ran b() using 2 as an argument?

b(2);

function a(x)
{
    return x * 2;
}

function b(x)
{
    return x * x;
}

The result would be the same. Because x is 2, thus it would still be (2 x 2 = 4)!

4

That's a very simple example of how an identical result does not equate to an identical formula. Obviously, x multiplied by itself is not the same formula as x multiplied by 2, unless x is 2. What if x wasn't 2? What if x was some other value, say, 10? Then the two formulae would yield very different results.

The Takeaway

Thus, when testing code, you test with a variety of input and in a variety of environments, to ensure that the formula is correct. Because if you get what appears to be the correct result while applying an incorrect formula, your code is still incorrect. And this will lead to further problems down the road.

Apply the correct formula.

As a professional who codes for a living, I've had to sometimes apply certain code-related principles to life. If you want to ensure that your results are favorable, you have to apply the correct process with the correct input. It was never an issue of whether there was more or less money in my account. People were missing the point by a mile. The issue was that I didn't know where that money came from. That made me uncomfortable. It was imperative that I understand why there was extra money in my account.

Finally...

So where did that money come from? The answer was a lot simpler than I'd imagined.

During those few months, I was so busy with work that I didn't have time to go out and spend money. No fancy dinners, no movies, no whatever. And I was certainly too busy to check and see how much money there was in Account B before the monthly funds transfer. Thus whatever money that was left over at the end of the month, just kept accumulating.

And when I finally found the time to look, the sum had grown to four hundred dollars. Since it wasn't a result of anybody transferring money to my account, I naturally never received any notification.

Looks like I'm not as savvy as I thought, eh?

Warm regard$,
T___T