Table Topics Champion Buddy

Vivek Shah — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 14:35:43 +0000

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend

What I Built

I built a local Table Topics practice partner for all my fellow club members (Rishi specifically) to prepare for the upcoming contest season. It give you a Random topic for your impromptu speaking, speak your answer, get a ballot-style scorecard and one concrete recommendation. Open models only, nothing leaves your machine.

Ballot weights: Content 55, Delivery 30, Language 15. Criteria wording is a paraphrase, not official Toastmasters text. Delivery is judged from the transcript only.

Demo

Demo Run Output

Code

Here is the documented code

How I Built It

Everything runs locally through Ollama. An open-weight Gemma model generates a fresh Table Topic and later scores the transcript against the ballot weights (Content 55 / Delivery 30 / Language 15). Open-source Whisper (faster-whisper) handles transcription. No API keys, no cloud calls - a speech you're practicing for a contest stays on your machine, which matters when the material is personal.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

A closed API would make every practice session someone else's data and someone else's meter running. Open models mean any Toastmasters club anywhere can run this offline and free - and because the prompts are plain text, a club can tune the scoring to its own ballot without asking anyone's permission.

My Agent Session

Agent Session

Prize Categories

Best Use of Gemma.

Friend's response

Rishi : "Bro, Integrate this with whatsapp! it would make it go viral across the world! If I skip the initial setup, its a gem after that! "

Using MindsDB to Predict Microsoft Stock Prices

Vivek Shah — Mon, 31 Oct 2022 21:01:30 +0000

Ever wanted to be the Oracle like the Delphic one and use it to predict stocks in your portfolio? Can't take to the past but with MindsDB you could take a shot at predicting the future via this simple tutorial.

What is MindsDB?

MindsDB is a SQL-based tool that can be used to create and train time-series machine learning models directly from your database. With MindsDB, data teams and data analysts can use their data to build, train, optimize, and deploy machine learning models that provide meaningful insights for real-world problems.

img source
Setup
Start off with you using the MindsDB Cloud Editor (create your free MindsDB Cloud account here) to create and train your time series prediction model.

Get your Dataset
Download data set from Kaggle for our demo to work with Microsoft stock prices :

Upload your file into MindsDB
You can either load from a database or a file. We'll go with file in this demo.

Check your data
Sanity check your data loads up fine with a simple select query. You can use limit to have only a few records load.

Create a Predictor Model
Tap in the following syntax to get MindsDB to kick off the predictor model. Depending on the volume of data, this could take some time and you might see a "training" error if you query earlier than it is completed.

Data Insights
You can also quickly glean at the data insights generated visually to give you a quick look into the trends for the data sets you have pulled in.

Run a Query for an extrapolated Dates to see the magic
Since our data set is till July 2022, let's try a more recent date like 30th October 2022

With that last step, we have successfully created and trained Using historical data, we can easily try to predict the future. Hopefully my stock broker ain't reading this.

MindsDB makes machine learning simple, intuitive, and extremely effective! Do you have something interesting you’d like to forecast? Head to MindsDB and start training your model today!

DEV Community: Vivek Shah