Hartley Brody

A collection of the projects that I've worked on. Check out my latest stuff on Github. Last updated Dec 18, 2020.

2020


N95 Snatcher After months of scouring the internet for n95 masks, I had basically given up hope of finding any. Once I built this site, I was able to snag some within a few days. I got an email when a big shipment of legit 3M n95 masks became available, and I was able to get two boxes before they sold out.

MedSimulate I discovered there was an opportunity for software to help nursing students translate pharmacology concepts into clinical decision making skills. I created a site with simulated clinical scenarios and a medication order, to allow students to practice reviewing the patient's chart to ensure the medication, route and dose were appropriate and safe for the patient.

2019


Hospital Explorer After spending hours pouring over medicare reports to find a good local hospital, I realized there could be value in building a simple, clean web interface on top of the boring, bureaucratic data. So I built one in 6 hours.

Web Scraping Boilerplate Just as I built a `flask-boilerplate` project 2 years ago to help me get up to speed on new projects quickly by not having to reinvent the wheel, I created a web scraping boilerplate project will all of the generic, website-agnostic scraping logic you need to build a substantial web scraper quickly.

2018


Card Betting As I'm starting to learn a few schools of thought related to betting and card games, I figured it'd be worth building my own "automated casino" so that I could test different card game strategies and collect some of my own data.

USD to BTC Price Converter A fun, simple project I built for a friend. This is a Chrome Extension that scans the current page, looks for prices listed in USD and converts the numbers to BTC, using the current exchange rate.

2017


Facebook Messenger Bot Course While it originally started due to a successful Facebook Messenger Bot tutorial that I wrote in 2016, I spent a lot more time building out a facebook messenger bot online course, and added lots more code and use-cases to the github project. Ultimately, I decided to close the course due to low enrollment, and release the code for free in branches on github.

Flask Boilerplate After building a dozen web apps for clients over the years, I realized there was a lot of common, boilerplate code I was using sharing between projects. I had been writing it once and then mostly copying it into later projects. I figured I'd combine all of the common, generic web application logic into one repository that I could use as a starting point for future projects.

The Ultimate Guide to Web Scraping v2 The book had received thousands of purchases since I first launched it in 2013. Dozens of readers had emailed me over the years with questions asking specific web scraping techniques that I hadn't covered in the book. I went back and added a lot more content as well as reorganized and rewrote large sections of the book so that things were more clear and easy to find for those skimming for answers to particular issues.

2016


Savings Calculator I made a simple, back-of-the-napkin financial planning calculator to help illustrate how income, spending and interest rates have a huge impact on how your savings will grow and when you can retire. Built the tool in a weekend going through a few iterations before settling on bootstrap and angular.js.

Scrape This Site Building on the success of my previous web scraping projects, I built an entire portal that's designed to teach the art of web scraping. There's a section of free, simplified sandbox content that anyone can use to practice building web scrapers, as well as a premium, member's only area with video screencasts, tutorials and downloadable code.

Backpacking Checklist Generator Having made many of my own backpacking checklists over the years, and wanting to help others do the same, I built a tool that takes a bit of information about your backpacking trip and generates a packing list. Generated over 10,000 trip checklists in the first week.

Townhall When I set out to create a public slack team to support my adventure blog, I realized there weren't a lot of good tools to make slack work for hosting a public community. So I decided to build those tools myself. Hosted signup pages, activity digest emails for admins, embeddable stats widgets, and more!

2015


Adventure Blog Since the focus of blog.hartleybrody.com has always been about technology, product and software development, I decided to create a new blog to write about the other big part of my life -- going on adventures. The content is mostly focused on hiking and backpacking, with a bit of frontcountry travel as well. Learn more.

Feed News A prank site that allows anyone to create real-looking "news" stories to post on Facebook and trick their friends. Some example stories are on the homepage.

Keyhole We all know that our applications should encourage users to have strong passwords, but it's often not a priority. We might add some weird rules like "must contain number and capital letter" but those were only half-hearted attempts at real password security. I made a service that allows you to set powerful validations with a simple, 5-minute integration to ensure that users were making strong passwords.

blogcaster As podcasts were starting to become more mainstream, I realized they were a cool way to consume content on the go. I started working on a service that would take text content -- like articles and blog posts -- and convert them to audio podcasts, so that you could listen to them in the car, on your commute, or anywhere else you might normally listen to music or podcasts.

2014


Ticket Snatcher While trying to get tickets to the Colbert Report for a friend, I realized there was no good way to snag some without checking their website constantly. So I put my web scraping and web development skills to good use and built a handy app for myself. After a bit of polish, I decided it was ready for the world to use.

Web Starter For anyone who might've taken a few coding classes online but has no idea how to get started building web applications, I threw together a basic project you can use as a template to get started. It includes both the code for a super simple web app, as well as step-by-step instructions for getting it setup on your computer (assumes Mac OSX).

2013


Project Naming A quick hack that allows you to check multiple versions of a project's name for available domains, twitter and facebook handles, and more! I found myself spending an hour on Google whenever I wanted to start building something just so that I could find a good name. This makes that much easier.

Rooster App I built Rooster App as a fun project for myself, but also because I wanted to break out of the mold that says every new app needs to be delivered via web browser or smart phone. Tons of people in the world don't have smart phones or reliable internet access, but still have more basic things like email and SMS. I wrote about what I learned here.

BuzzKill BuzzKill is a Chrome Extension that automatically removes all Buzz Feed content from your Facebook browsing experience. I built it to scratch a personal itch, and also to learn the ins-and-outs of building a browser extension. I wrote about what I learned here.

Online Swim Trainer Online Swim Trainer is a simple MVP I built to test whether people would pay for swimming workouts online. The product was designed to be highly email-centric so that I could build & send workouts manually while I tested the idea, instead of wasting a bunch of time building a big workout generation system.

2012


Mvsic Mvsic was an inbound marketing platform for artists. Co-founded by myself and another music blogger, mvsic wasn't just another file sharing website. Mvsic offered fan-level analytics and ways for artists to easily "charge" for downloads -- either financially or with a social share.

Rompbomp Rompbomp was a social network dedicated to sharing fashion ideas and looks. Besides the social network aspects of the site, there was also a large content scraper (50,000+ products including images and meta information) as well as a recommendation engine.

The College Cartel The College Cartel started out as my first PHP web development project back in the fall of 2010. Originally, it was simply an RSS aggregator for several college music blogs. With the remake in 2012, I converted it to a django project and began tracking all visitors and clicks.

2011


Safe Ride Web Service Built a RESTful backend API for a mobile app. Learned the basics of django, RESTful design best practices, and how to deal with old school ops people.

Music Hack Day NYC Worked on a project called jam.ly, a way for fans to connect with artists at a show via text message. We ended up winning a $1000 sponsor prize and got a write up in Billboard magazine. The project was written in PHP as a Code Ignitor application.