>Benjamin Gaines

Beckyz Beatz

Webhosted retro hip hop radio channel. This is a simple site built using Flask. It randomly selects a song when loaded, and continues doing so after each song completes for as long as the browser tab is open.

Link Extractor Plugin for Brave *

Brave plugin to extract links from a page, save them as .csv files, and then write them to a sqlite database. This is for use on sites wherein lots of copying and pasting links is necessary.

Datasette Quickstart Guide *

Simple instructions for installing Datasette and hosting a password protected, full text search instance on Heroku.

Full Text Search SEC Reg D Database (Datasette)

I am a huge fan of Simon Willison's Datasette. This is an example of using Datasette and sqlite-utils to build a Full Text Search app for SEC Reg D filings

Full Text Search Sanctions Database (Datasette)

Another example of the utility of sqlite + Datasette + sqlite-utils + FTS. This is a distro of some of the (archived) KYC-Lite data. The data is completely public. It is password protected here simply to demo the auth feature. User = 'root'. Pass = 'sanctions'

Word + Excel + Outlook = Mass Email Campaigns *

There is a way to send mass emails using the built in features from Word, Excel, and Outlook. This option is free and, in my opinion, better than most paid services anyhow. Here is how to do it.

CMSCA Data Science

I give monthly data science classes for students with the Charlotte Mecklenburg Scholastic Chess Association (CMSCA). Its a rewarding and fun experience.

Good Scrapes *

Good Scrapes is a collection of web-scraped recipes from some of my wife’s favorite cooking sites, most notably: Martha Stewart (thus the title ‘Good Scrapes’).

My First Video Game

This was a silly game I made for my wife using PyGame. Unfortunately there is no way to host games written in PyGame on a browser. Here are some screenshots, however.

This is a retro-themed video game website I made for my wife. This was a fun Christmas project and one I intend to maintain going forward. Developing retro games is relaxing, and I believe the harsh limitations of the approach actually encourage creativity.

Toast's Rabbit Roundup is a PICO-8 game I made for my friends Collin, Sora, and their corgi Toast. The game is also linked to the super painter girl website.

Jumpin James Oliver is a PICO-8 game I adapted from Pico-Dino. I did so for my cousins Nick & Dana to welcome their new baby boy James to the world. The game is also linked to the super painter girl website.

Crab People From Planet 48b is a comic book I made using the DALL-E 2 model. The site also has an 'easter egg' hidden within it (spoiler: its a video game).

Building a Knowledge Graph of Bible Characters

This was a fun afternoon project to use Obsidian.md to make a Knowledge Graph of bible characters. For context: ‘knowledge graphs’ are basically the digital equivalent to those link analysis charts you often see crime shows.

News Noise Filter is a simple application I created for personal use. It is a filter for news websites whereby one can search for topics of interest to have articles screened-in and of disinterest to have articles screened out. Additionally, it scrapes all the relevant articles and returns a plain text html file (so no ads, clickbait, etc.). A sample output is hyperlinked above.

Rebecca-Fi is as an application whereby users can upload a photo and have it generated to ASCII art (with or without color). I made this because Rebecca inspired me with a lesson she gave her students about iconography. The link above has some sample outputs.

Ben's Notes (Archived)

This is a 'dumping ground' of thoughts, reflections, and notes, most of which are quite rough. (In fact, some notes aren't even even complete thoughts.).

Small Search is a full-text search & recommendation engine for landscaping firms in the southeast. It is a proof of concept for the power of creating small, focused search applications for business needs that cannot be satisfied through traditional search engines.

The KYC-Lite Alpha test received such overwhelmingly positive feedback that I've decided to more thoughtfully pursue this effort. The Beta is up and running. It can be viewed at the link above.

KYC-Lite was an Alpha test I developed this to explore the value of a ‘no-frills’ KYC-focused search tool. Of the various side projects I’ve developed, this is the most exciting to me, both for its market potential and for its overall cool factor.

My first startup! My friend Collin and I started Jackpot in the summer of 2019. Headquartered in NYC, the business unfortunately took a significant blow during the first year of the pandemic.

This is a full-text search engine for the databases of some of my wife's favorite museums. It is a Dash application hosted on Heroku currently, but I'll likely try to convert this to a static page in early 2022.

Jackpot Insights is an Alpha Test developed to explore the potential of a private market data platform akin to Pitchbook, but specifically for lower and middle market firms. It received some great feedback; there is definitely potential here.

This application is still web-hosted and view-able, but it is no longer being maintained. This was built during the early phases of the pandemic, when actual COVID data -- not opinions -- was quite difficult to find.

I love my wife so very much. In my spare time, I like to make her goofy little apps and old-school video games (themed ‘Super Painter Girl’). Becky Rocks is a flask application I built to house some of that stuff, though I honestly do a poor job maintaining it.

Becky’s Beau was a fun weekend project to visualize the growth data of my son, Judson, for his first 100 days of life. He was born pre-mature, and really struggled to put on weight his first few weeks. As a result, we kept a ledger of his feeds. This app visualizes that data.

A friend of mine works in the energy sector and was considering founding a consultancy ('Prescience') to help energy and utilities firms forecast maintenance issues. I put this together for him over a weekend to help him with initial client interviews and pitches.

My team at work put together a tool for assembling private market data (like Pitchbook without all the useless features). When we were advertising the tool early on, I put this app together to show samples of the data and a recommendation engine built on top of it.

The landing page of this website is actually a random quote generator. If you keep clicking on my name, quotes I’ve selected will refresh at random. It is a pretty simple JavaScript use case. Use the developer tools view to see the JavaScript (and all of the quotes).

I've been experimenting with event listeners on static pages, with an eye towards creating an offline only page. This page is a proof of concept. This page shows different content depending on if you are online or offline.

(This is a temp page while I work on a comic book that I'll be making into a website. Similar to the super painter girl temp-page, once it is complete I'll make it its own website, not an extension of my personal site)

(This is another temporary page while I explore charts.css. The idea of hosting dashboards on static pages is really interesting to me, so I'm using this as a sandbox for testing out ideas.)