BoundingPulse

Overview

BoundingPulse grew out of craigSearch, a Python tool that automated and filtered Craigslist searches beyond what the site itself allows. It evolved into a full-stack, AWS-hosted analytics platform that ingests Craigslist posts nationwide for geographic cost insights, with text indexing for advanced search — all backed by a scraping + database pipeline.

-> boundingpulse.com user: silas pw: password

Motivation

One day I was interested in buying a 4-wheeler to fix up and sell, but I had no insight into market volume, what a good price was, and the likelyhood of re-selling at a profit. Many additional interests came into play, but this was the primary motivator.

Challenges

• This was my first proper foray into full-stack development. I had just finished a course with my masters program aimed at using cloud platforms for AI/ML Deployment.
• Scraping Craigslist reliably at scale and expanding national coverage.
• Interactive web UI and geographic heatmaps populated with user search results.

What I learned

• Designing and deploying a full-stack, AWS-hosted application end to end.
• End-to-end data pipelines and working with a relational database.
• The importance of starting a project with a directory structure that enables modular scaling.
• Solving problems with early AI coding tools, back when they needed a lot of hand-holding.

Status & next steps

The core premise — monitoring public activity at scale — still holds, and I like it as a way of surfacing signal from noisy public data. Much of what I learned here carried directly into MarkEverything.