Fionn Hughes
about
Second-year Computer Science student at UCD, based in Dublin. I'm most experienced in C++, I built and shipped PulseDB, a C++ system monitor, on Windows and am now porting it to Linux. I use Python for the open data pipelines below. C and Java from coursework, some TypeScript from open source.
Outside of college I coach tennis at Tennis4Kids, a few evenings a week, running my own groups of under-12s. I've been around the sport for a long time before I ended up coaching.
I like writing code that involves the backend, lower level system code. This page is a log of what I've shipped and what's still being built.
achievements
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UCD Entrance Scholarship 2025Awarded on the basis of my LC results and a written application piece.
education
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University College Dublin since 2025BSc Computer Science, second year.
projects
PulseDB
Self-hosted system observability daemon. Shipped v1.0.0 on Windows, now porting to Linux. C++20 backend with its own time-series storage engine, Tauri + React desktop app. Built to replace a Task Manager I don't like.
- custom .pulse format: LZ4-compressed chunks, delta-encoded timestamps, per-metric WAL with xxHash32 checksums
- seven native collectors (cpu, ram, disk, network, processes, system, power) on a Boost.Asio scheduler, passed a 24-hour stability run
- alert engine with threshold, sustained and rate-of-change rules, exposed over a Drogon REST + WebSocket API
- ships with an NSIS installer; Linux port has storage and four collectors done
Transport Delay Tracker
Logging live GTFS-Realtime data from Dublin's TFI bus network, building toward an ML model that predicts delays before they happen. Working on it with a friend, Viktoriia.
- polling the NTA GTFS-R feed, writing trip and stop updates to Postgres
- next: training a delay-prediction model on the logged data
- self-hosted, running 24/7 on a spare Ubuntu server
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
- over 230k combined Reddit views across the three 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.
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
now
Porting PulseDB to Linux, logging live TFI transit data for a delay-prediction model, and applying for summer 2027 software engineering internships.
- PulseDB: Windows v1.0.0 shipped. On Linux, storage plus CPU, RAM, disk and network collectors are done; processes, power and the daemon are next
- Transport Delay Tracker: collecting live GTFS-R data, next step is training the model on it
- Starting: an Irish Sign Language learning app with camera-based feedback, built with Viktoriia
let's connect
Want a public Irish or EU dataset scraped, cleaned, and republished on a schedule? Get in touch. Small jobs from €10, scales with source complexity. I'll get back to you in a day or two.
email me →