Welcome to The Detective’s Notebook 🐼

While our Mystery Series takes you through step-by-step adventures with Masha & Panda, this is where we share the stories behind the stories - quick insights, real-world encounters, and thoughts on the evolving world of accounting automation.

Recent Discoveries 📝

The Great Legacy System Migration of 2024

Posted: Coming Soon

Every mystery we write starts with a real scenario. Last month’s adventure with a 40-year-old mainframe system that stored negative numbers as “1,234CR” taught us that sometimes the biggest mysteries aren’t in the data - they’re in understanding how systems from different eras “think” about numbers.

Why We Chose Detective Stories Over Tutorials

Posted: Coming Soon

Traditional Python tutorials are great, but they don’t stick. When you’re troubleshooting a real problem at 4 PM on a Friday, you need to remember not just the syntax, but the why. Stories create memory hooks that syntax examples can’t match.

The Month Masha Almost Broke Production

Posted: Coming Soon

A cautionary tale about the time our fictional detective’s real-world inspiration ran a merge_asof on the entire customer database without realizing the sort wasn’t optimized. Spoiler alert: Always test on samples first!

Quick Tips & Code Snippets 💡

Today’s Pandas Wisdom

# Quick way to spot duplicate transactions
df[df.duplicated(['amount', 'date', 'customer_id'], keep=False)]

Use this when you suspect someone entered the same transaction twice

Regex Rescue

# Extract any currency amount from messy text
import re
amounts = re.findall(r'\$[\d,]+(?:\.\d{2})?', messy_text)

Perfect for parsing vendor emails with pricing scattered throughout

Reader Mysteries 🔍

Have a real accounting scenario that would make a great mystery? We love hearing about:

  • Legacy system quirks that had you scratching your head
  • Data quality nightmares that required detective work
  • Excel-to-Python conversion stories (the good, bad, and ugly)
  • Audit discoveries that revealed interesting patterns

Drop us a line - your real-world mystery might become Masha & Panda’s next adventure!

Tools We Actually Use 🛠️

For Data Detective Work:

  • pandas (obviously!)
  • regex for text extraction
  • openpyxl for Excel integration
  • matplotlib for quick visualizations

For Productivity:

  • Jupyter notebooks for exploration
  • VS Code for serious development
  • Git for version control (yes, even for accounting scripts!)

This notebook is updated regularly with new insights, code snippets, and behind-the-scenes stories from the world of accounting automation. Check back often!

Support Our Detective Work ☕

If our mysteries have helped solve your real-world problems, consider fueling our next investigation: