Blog
Writing about projects I've built, problems I've run into, and things I've figured out.
-
What I learned scraping public data for a side project
Lessons from building a database of Finnish company registry data: when to scrape vs. when to bulk-download, deduplication challenges, and how to structure data that changes over time.
-
Building a license plate reader for under €50
OpenCV, Tesseract, a Raspberry Pi camera module, and a SQLite log. This is what it actually takes to build a working driveway plate reader from scratch.
-
Designing a database that remembers what used to be true
When you overwrite historical records, you lose the ability to answer questions about the past. A walkthrough of slowly changing dimensions and bi-temporal modeling with practical SQL.
-
Why I stopped checking flight status manually
An RTL-SDR dongle, a Raspberry Pi, and a small Python script that notifies me when a specific flight crosses a radius around home. The airline app is the last to know.
-
I turned an old Android phone into a security camera
Instead of buying another Wi-Fi camera, I repurposed a Pixel 3a into a local MJPEG stream with basic motion detection. Here's how it works and what I learned.