Example projects

A live public lookup, two custom tools, two analytics projects built from public records, and one site still in progress.

How's your town doing?

Live

The problem

North Dakota publishes taxable sales for every city each quarter, but only as separate reports. Seeing how one town is trending means pulling years of them by hand.

What I built

A public lookup covering 50 cities, every quarter since 2019, built from the State Tax Commissioner's reports. Pick a city to see its last four quarters, the change from the year before and its best quarter.

What changed

Anyone can check how their town's economy is moving in a few seconds, with all 50 cities ranked side by side.

Open the town lookup

Equipment calibration registry

The problem

Field instruments at several sites each needed regular calibration. Due dates lived in separate spreadsheets kept by different people, so the only way to know what was overdue was to go looking.

What I built

One registry for every instrument across every site, showing where each one is, its serial number and when it's next due, with automatic reminders sent ahead of each due date.

What changed

Upcoming calibrations surface on their own, so they get scheduled before they lapse instead of being found after.

Shipment paperwork builder

The problem

Regulated shipments required detailed paperwork produced in an expensive legacy desktop program that was slow to use and tied to one computer.

What I built

A purpose-built replacement that produces the same required documents from a simple form, reusing saved shipment and container details so nothing gets typed twice.

What changed

Paperwork that used to mean retyping the same details goes out from a single form, without the yearly license for the old software.

Treatment plant operations analytics

The problem

Waste treatment plants file mandatory operating reports with regulators. The data is valuable, but it's scattered across scanned filings that can't be compared or trended.

What I built

A business analytics program built on that mandatory reporting data, obtained through a FOIA request, that turns individual filings into consistent numbers by plant and by month.

What changed

Plant activity and month-to-month trends across the market in one place, without opening a single PDF.

Waste disposal market dashboard

The problem

Disposal operators report their activity to regulators every month, one facility at a time. The reports aren't combined anywhere.

What I built

A dashboard built on FOIA-obtained reports that tracks the state of the market for waste disposal operators, comparing facilities month over month across the past year.

What changed

Who is handling how much, how that's shifting, and where the reporting has gaps. New months drop in as they arrive.

Curve Ahead Trends

In progress

The idea

Paid trend-research tools are expensive, and much of what they track comes from public sources anyone can pull.

What I'm building

A site that spots topics rising across the US early, built entirely on free public data and updated automatically.

Why it matters to you

The same approach works on your own data: find what's starting to grow, or slip, before it shows up in the monthly numbers.

Got a spreadsheet nobody wants to touch?

Send a couple of lines about it and I'll tell you what I'd do with it.

troy@curveaheadtech.com

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