To practice convolutional neural network (CNN) design, I worked on a classification problem that was more challenging than toy datasets but still lightweight enough to train quickly on my local machine. The following details the design of a 3-block CNN architecture and the lessons I learned from training it on clothing image data. Dataset Characteristics…
Portfolio
Java Elevator Simulator
This is an interactive elevator simulator written in Java with Swing graphics. Users can click the ▲ (up) and ▼ (down) buttons on each floor to spawn riders and call the elevator. When a rider enters the elevator, the user selects their destination floor via a pop-up panel. The program uses a scheduling algorithm called…
OCR Image Search
This Flask app scans a folder of images and makes the text inside them fully searchable, using open-source Tesseract OCR. This could be helpful for someone who has a massive folder of screenshots or scanned documents and wants to find what they need without uploading everything to a cloud service. This app runs 100% locally…
Data Science CV
I published my professional resume at cv.blakerayvid.com, turning my old Word file into an HTML/CSS/JS document. It lists my skills, projects, work history, and provides a PDF download. I built it to give a fast, clear view of what I do. Thanks to this change, I can now maintain my resume with VSCode. 🔗 View…
Compare Stock Returns
This page lets you enter multiple stock tickers (eg. AAPL, MSFT, GOOGL) and even custom portfolio expressions (eg. 0.5*NVDA, 0.25*AMZN, 0.25*KO) and compare their performance against a benchmark (eg. SPY) over any time period. It’s built with Python and Flask on the backend. Data comes from Yahoo Finance via the yfinance library, pandas crunches the…
SOAP: A New Polling Platform
Constructive political criticism online is hard to find. Discussions quickly turn mean, and even minor disagreements can escalate into major arguments. Messages often get lost if one’s audience is too small, and misunderstood words can lead to backlash. That’s where Soap comes in—a new kind of social platform designed to change the way we talk…
Based News Reader
This script fetches the latest Google News RSS headlines for a user-supplied list of topics and regularly updates an HTML page hosted on Railway. Gemini AI prioritizes the headlines based on the user’s preferences. Designed to be scheduled with cron on any Unix-based system. 🗞️ news.blakerayvid.com How It Works 🔗 View on GitHub
TQQQ Trading Algorithm
Developing a successful trading algorithm is about finding the right balance between capturing market gains and managing risks. In this capstone project for the Flatiron School Data Science Bootcamp, I created and refined a QuantConnect trading algorithm that combines a dynamic strategy for SPY with a risk-managed approach for TQQQ. The goal was to optimize…