NZCarAuctions

NZ Car Auctions, Part 3: Predicting Prices With XGBoost

A small side project that evolved from a simple daily crawler into a price prediction tool for New Zealand insurance auctions.

NZCarAuctions

NZ Car Auctions, Part 1: Building a 660,000-Record Dataset

How a small daily crawler pointed at New Zealand's insurance auctions quietly grew into a three-year, 660,000-record public dataset. Scraping, GitHub Actions, cleaning, and the gotchas along the way.

NZCarAuctions

NZ Car Auctions, Part 2: Analytics With Zero Servers

What 1,100 days of NZ salvage auctions reveal, and how FindCars NZ serves interactive charts and a free JSON API from a purely static site.

Two Wrecks, One Free Motorcycle

A field guide to having expensive fun with no money, worked through on the example of ending up with a road-legal 250 that cost nothing. Two auction wrecks, an engine crane doing a job it was never sold for, and a receipt that came out even.

The Sandbox That Draws Its Own Contours

A short-throw projector and a depth camera turn a box of sand into a live topographic map. Built for Te Papa during the Mahuki accelerator, out of timber from my weekend job at PlaceMakers.

How the Garage Happened

How a Masters student on a tight scholarship accidentally stumbled into car flipping, learned to wrench, and funded skiing, surfing, and road trips across New Zealand.