Fionn Hughes
about
First-year Computer Science student at UCD, based in Dublin. Strongest in C from the coursework side, picked up Python this semester to build the open datasets below. A bit of HTML, CSS and JS from school, and learning C++ on the side for PulseDB.
Outside of college I'm an assistant tennis coach at Tennis4Kids, a few evenings a week with the under-12s. I've been around the sport for a long time before I ended up coaching.
I like writing code that runs on a schedule and produces something useful at the end. Less interested in slick frontends, more interested in pipelines that quietly do a thing every Tuesday at 14:00 UTC and leave a clean file behind. This page is a log of what I've shipped, what's still being built, and what I'm reading this week.
education
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University College Dublin since 2025BSc Computer Science, first year. Strongest in C from Comp 10050 (Software Engineering Project), picking up Python on the side for the dataset work below.
projects
Irish open data scraper●
A Python pipeline that pulls a handful of Irish public datasets on a cron, cleans them up, and pushes the output to Kaggle and Hugging Face. Each one has a starter notebook on Kaggle that reruns the day after the data refreshes. Whole thing lives on GitHub Actions, source at FionnHughes/irish-open-datasets.
- about 2.3M rows in total across the three feeds
- around 130k aggregate Reddit views since the launch posts
- schedules: PPR monthly, oil bulletin weekly, BER monthly, no manual triggers
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Every Irish residential sale since 2010, refreshed monthly.
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Weekly retail fuel prices for every EU member state.
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SEAI's BER tool turned into a parquet file you can actually open.
PulseDB
Self-hosted Windows system observability. C++20 backend, Tauri + React frontend, custom on-disk format. Built to replace a Task Manager I don't like.
- collector targets under 2% CPU at one-second sampling
- custom .pulse binary format with LZ4-compressed chunks
- five GUI screens: live, history, processes, alerts, settings
Chess.com piece for Activepieces
A community piece I wrote and got merged into activepieces, an open-source workflow automation platform (think self-hostable Zapier). Wraps Chess.com's public API so workflows can pull player data without needing an API key.
- three actions: get player profile, get player stats, get daily puzzle
- Zod validation on the username input, encodeURIComponent on the URL
- 222 lines added, merged into main as PR #13018
out there
- Property Price Register, every Irish residential sale since 2010 → r/irishpersonalfinance · 24k views · 22 upvotes
- EU Oil Bulletin, weekly fuel prices across the EU → cross-posted · ~105k aggregate views · 273 upvotes
- Building Energy Ratings, SEAI's BER tool as a parquet → just launched · numbers TBD
now
Mostly heads-down on PulseDB's Windows ETW collector.
- Reading: Systems Performance (Brendan Gregg)
- Side thing: a candidate fourth dataset, leaning toward bus punctuality
- Avoiding: anything that requires writing a frontend (and yet, here we are)
let's connect
Want a public Irish or EU dataset scraped, cleaned, and republished on a schedule? Get in touch. Small jobs from €50, scales with source complexity. I'll get back to you in a day or two.
email me →