tl;dr: how to use a cheap personal VPN for scraping ( code here ) cost: $0 (+ NordVPN free trial or subscription of your choosing) build time: 15 minutes (MVP) disclaimer before jumping into this This post and my work are not sponsored by Nord. I've found it nice to work with …
Thanks for reading. Questions or comments? 👉🏻 alec@contextify.io
tl;dr: Use GPT-3 to automate data collection, enrichment, and standardization cost: $0 to start; up to $400/mo at scale time: 30 minutes table of contents: background pricing auth prompts classification classification implementation classification results summarization summarization implementation synthesis synthesis implementation enrichment implementation business implications background The…
tl;dr: I explain several ways to create and use Google API Console auth read time: 10m (skim), closer to an hour to implement and test cost: free The Google API Console is home to a baffling array of 305 APIs (at time of writing), including Google Docs, Sheets, Drive …
tl;dr: screenshots of data from HN traffic read time: 8 minutes This past Sunday, I posted an article to Hacker News They seemed to like it . It got 554 points, 194 comments, and stayed on the front page for about a day and a half. It drove 24,000¹ …
tl;dr: find spontaenous interactions by scraping tweets with given keywords cost: $0 build time: 5 minutes (MVP) Twitter can be a great way to connect with alike minds. But if you're here, you're (probably) not yet a Thought Leader™. Let's walk through a quick way to speed that up …
tl;dr: learn the language of tech niches read time: 10m (skim), closer to an hour top to bottom Below is a condensed glossary from my time working in early stage VC, growth, and software engineering. It is designed to approachable for everyone, especially those without a prior background in …
tl;dr: don't miss important personal moments with your own personal CRM cost: $0 build time: 20 minutes (MVP) Update August 2020: the trick that enabled easy data import has been disabled. you can still use this build, but it will be more manual to set up Hey friends, if …
tl;dr: create automations and workflows in Alfred cost: $0 after one-time $31 cost build time: 2 minutes (download existing) / 20-60 minutes (build your own) you may remember me raving about Alfred in my SaaS stack article . (If not, it's a cool software that has a bunch of neat features …
tl;dr: Use free & free-ish software and save lots of time cost: (generally $0; in-line for each item) read time: 10 minutes All listed softwares have (at minimum) a free trial. All recommendations are products I use and have not been incentivized to promote. productivity Alfred ($31 onetime) - This is …
tl;dr: Manage your website events and pixels easily in one place cost: $0 time: 15 minutes Google Tag Manager is the most approachable¹, most scalable², and most commonly used 'event' management system for a budding website/webapp. It is free and can be easily³ shared with non-technical collaborators once …
tl;dr: Use advanced Google Search to find any webpage, emails, info, or secrets cost: $0 time: 2 minutes Software engineers have long joked about how much of their job is simply Googling things Now you can do the same, but for free Below, I'll cover dorking , the use of …
tl;dr: How to use and productionize Google Colab, a free Jupyter Notebook service cost: $0 build time: 15 minutes (MVP) Google Colaboratory (or just Colab) is a recently popular cloud-ish implementation of Jupyter Notebooks . In addition to Jupyter features you're familiar with - cell based execution, shared state across cells …
tl;dr: write serverless infrastructure as code cost: $0 build time: 5 minutes (MVP) overview Serverless, confusingly, means two things. There's serverless the concept - your infra provider dynamically spins up compute at invocation time and (spins it down after). This means no more worrying about managing (or scaling) compute - it's …
tl;dr: write Javascript in Google Sheets to build advanced automations cost: $0 build time: 10 minutes (MVP) updated: 2021-06-23 table of contents: #1 - getting started #2 - reading GSheet tabs #3 - writing GSheet tabs #4 - API requests #5 - end user UX #6 - gotchas #7 - snippets #8 - auth for sharing AppScript …
tl;dr: create all Google Ads auth components so you can automate Google & Youtube Ads cost: $0 (you don't necessarily need to run any ads, either) build time: 60 minutes before getting into it, one (or two) disclaimer(s): There are two Google ad-related API suites: the old Adwords API …
tl;dr: How to set up AWS Simple Email Service, through which you can send emails via many invocation methods cost: $0 per first 62k emails/mo build time: 60 minutes (MVP) + 2 days wait to get out of sandbox Every SaaS product at scale leans heavily on email for …
tl;dr: bind common commands to shortcuts. save time. love life. cost: $0 or $29 one time with Alfred Powerpack read time: 15 minutes Below, I overview the bash snippets I regularly use, and how you can easily invoke them with shortcodes table of contents: how to implement general virtualenv …
tl;dr: How to make a static website, built on Pelican, Netlify hosting, Netlify CMS, and Github. cost: $0/mo (<$1/mo w/ domain) build time: 45 minutes (MVP) / 2.5 hours (with CMS + custom domain name) why static (vs dynamic) sites With a personal site, less is really more …
tl;dr: BeautifulSoup selectors and code snippets Once you've become familiar with scraping websites with Python, requests, and BeautifulSoup (if not, read this first ), you'll want to start creating reusable components to speed build time and improve data reliability. Below I've included reference snippets for extracting data cleaning data picking …
tl;dr: Using Python requests and BeautifulSoup libraries to scrape data from most data sources cost: $0 build time: 30 minutes (MVP) / 120 minutes (cleaner v2) BeautifulSoup allows you to navigate through the raw HTML pulled down from a website (in JS, this is called 'Walking the DOM'). Generally, you …
tl;dr: set up the Reddit API and use it to generate interest data cost: $0 setup time: 5 minutes Reddit can be a great place to waste an hour or to explore particular new hobbies. It also can be a valuable source of free information on one's customers. In …
tl;dr: write down words you don't know I started a mental exercise some time ago: write down every word I came across and didn't understand (within reason; no floccinaucinihilipilification ) The below list is provided only to keep myself accountable. I'll update this page periodically. vocab didactic - intended to teach …
tl;dr: set up programmatic reads and writes from any Google Sheet you have access to cost: $0 build time: 15 minutes (MVP) Let's start with a hot take to get the blood boiling. Google Sheets is (probably) the most important database your company uses. Why? Every single employee can …
tl;dr: set up a pass-through phone number that forwards to anywhere cost: $0.0075 per inbound SMS build time: 15 minutes (MVP) overview Think of all the times you've had to submit a phone number to get a promotional code, or an ebook download, or the love of your …