About Ben Brannen

I’m Ben. I live in Waynesboro, Georgia, and I build practical tools around messy systems: dashboards, market notes, public records, automation, and small experiments that usually start because I wanted to understand something better.

What I’m building now

Most of the current work sits under the Small Town Capital idea: a private market research dashboard, options notes, public-record projects, automation workflows, and this site as the public notebook.

I use AI coding tools heavily, but the point is not to look automated. The point is to build faster, keep better receipts, and still know what has to be checked by hand.

Things I keep coming back to

The common thread is taking scattered information and turning it into cleaner decisions, repeatable workflows, and a public trail of the work.

  • Dashboards Taking information that lives in ten scattered places and putting it in one place I can actually use.
  • Automation Scripts, spreadsheets, APIs, and agents that remove repetitive work.
  • Investing Researching companies, options structures, and trade decisions for my own account, then writing down what I learn, especially the mistakes.
  • Public records Filings, meeting minutes, property records, and datasets that are public but annoying to use, plus tools that make the trail easier to follow.

Why this site exists

Mostly to write things down. Projects make more sense to me after I explain them, and half-finished experiments are easier to pick back up when there are notes. If I cannot describe a project plainly, it probably is not as far along as I think.

The public version is an operator journal: what I saw, what I built, what broke, and what became a rule for next time. The private work stays private.

Tools and background

I studied finance at Georgia Southern University and have spent years working across spreadsheets, data visualization, automation, scripting, and practical problem solving.

  • Google Sheets
  • Excel
  • Apps Script
  • Python
  • SQL
  • Bash / Linux
  • Looker Studio
  • Power BI
  • Astro
  • HTML / CSS / JavaScript
  • Raspberry Pi
  • Google Cloud Certified Digital Leader

Outside of projects

I’m also a runner, a skier, a self-taught guitar player, and someone who has a habit of turning personal challenges into data projects.

One example: I once ran 102 straight days of 5K or more and built a dashboard to keep score. Do the thing, track the thing, learn from the thing.

Say hello

If you want to talk about dashboards, automation, public records, markets, running, or a project you are building, reach out.

Email: benjamin.m.brannen@gmail.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/benjamin-brannen

Nothing here is investment advice. This site is a public notebook for projects, experiments, research habits, and lessons learned while building.