I like building things. These are side projects I’ve put together over the years — some useful, some just to scratch an itch. Each one taught me something about shipping product, even at a small scale.
Semantic Movie Recommender
2026 · Python, FAISS, Streamlit · Live Demo · Blog Post
Pick any movie and get three semantically similar recommendations — not by genre tags or collaborative filtering, but by what the movie is actually about. Built with pre-computed sentence-transformer embeddings and Facebook’s FAISS library. The model runs once offline; the live app is pure lookup. Zero inference cost at runtime.
Stock Predictor
2014 · Python, Sentiment Analysis · Blog Post
An open-source tool that listens to Reuters via a Twitter handle, screens articles for sentiment about stocks you care about, and suggests whether to buy or sell. Positive news pushes the score toward 1 (buy), negative toward 0 (short). A poor man’s high-frequency trading app — minus the leased line to the exchange.
Programmatic Music Downloader
2014 · Python, BeautifulSoup · Blog Post
A Python script that crawls a website, finds every mp3 link across all its pages, and downloads them with a progress indicator. Built it because MusicforProgramming.net had 27 pages of fantastic ambient coding music and I didn’t want to click each link manually. Abstracted enough to reuse on any site that hosts audio — I also used it to batch-download KEXP podcasts for long runs.
Vamsee Jasti 