for your information

automated proxies with NordVPN Mac

Alec Barrett-Wilsdon — Wed, 12 Oct 2022 17:30:00 +0000

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 …

[External] understanding DynamoDB pricing

Alec Barrett-Wilsdon — Sat, 31 Jul 2021 04:18:31 +0000

Thanks for reading. Questions or comments? 👉🏻 alec@contextify.io

build business tools with GPT3

Alec Barrett-Wilsdon — Tue, 13 Oct 2020 18:10:30 +0000

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

understanding Google auths

Alec Barrett-Wilsdon — Tue, 15 Sep 2020 18:32:00 +0000

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 …

anatomy of a HN hit

Alec Barrett-Wilsdon — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 12:50:30 +0000

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 …

scraping tweets for fun and profit

Alec Barrett-Wilsdon — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 11:33:00 +0000

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 …

talk the talk (a tech glossary)

Alec Barrett-Wilsdon — Sun, 05 Jul 2020 18:32:00 +0000

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 …

make your own personal CRM (for free in 20 minutes)

Alec Barrett-Wilsdon — Fri, 19 Jun 2020 01:30:00 +0000

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 …

how to make Alfred Workflows (& the ones I use)

Alec Barrett-Wilsdon — Thu, 11 Jun 2020 01:30:00 +0000

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 …

my personal SaaS stack

Alec Barrett-Wilsdon — Mon, 18 May 2020 01:30:00 +0000

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 …

set up Google Tag Manager (and track anything in Google Analytics)

Alec Barrett-Wilsdon — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 05:11:30 +0000

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 …

dorking (how to find anything on the Internet)

Alec Barrett-Wilsdon — Sat, 04 Apr 2020 04:10:30 +0000

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 …

mastering Colab

Alec Barrett-Wilsdon — Sun, 22 Mar 2020 00:30:48 +0000

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 …

set up a microservice in 5 minutes with Serverless

Alec Barrett-Wilsdon — Fri, 13 Mar 2020 01:30:00 +0000

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 …

mastering Google AppScript

Alec Barrett-Wilsdon — Wed, 19 Feb 2020 18:30:00 +0000

tl;dr: write Javascript in Google Sheets to build advanced automations

cost: $0

build time: 10 minutes (MVP)

updated: 2021-06-23

set up Google Ads APIs

Alec Barrett-Wilsdon — Mon, 03 Feb 2020 04:30:00 +0000

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 …

set up email sending (anywhere)

Alec Barrett-Wilsdon — Thu, 23 Jan 2020 05:54:34 +0000

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 …

bash shortcuts

Alec Barrett-Wilsdon — Fri, 13 Dec 2019 01:30:00 +0000

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

set up this blog

Alec Barrett-Wilsdon — Mon, 25 Nov 2019 17:30:00 -0800

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 …

mastering BeautifulSoup

Alec Barrett-Wilsdon — Thu, 31 Oct 2019 06:38:25 +0000

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 …

how to scrape

Alec Barrett-Wilsdon — Fri, 04 Oct 2019 04:10:30 +0000

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 …

set up Reddit API

Alec Barrett-Wilsdon — Fri, 20 Sep 2019 09:34:00 +0000

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 …

vocab

Alec Barrett-Wilsdon — Sun, 04 Aug 2019 04:11:32 +0000

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 …

set up Google Sheets APIs (and treat Sheets like a database)

Alec Barrett-Wilsdon — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 09:30:00 +0000

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 …

set up Twilio SMS to Email

Alec Barrett-Wilsdon — Tue, 25 Jun 2019 08:32:00 +0000

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 …

for your information

automated proxies with NordVPN Mac

disclaimer before jumping into this

[External] understanding DynamoDB pricing

build business tools with GPT3

table of contents:

background

understanding Google auths

anatomy of a HN hit

scraping tweets for fun and profit

talk the talk (a tech glossary)

make your own personal CRM (for free in 20 minutes)

how to make Alfred Workflows (& the ones I use)

my personal SaaS stack

productivity

set up Google Tag Manager (and track anything in Google Analytics)

dorking (how to find anything on the Internet)

mastering Colab

set up a microservice in 5 minutes with Serverless

overview

mastering Google AppScript

table of contents:

set up Google Ads APIs

before getting into it, one (or two) disclaimer(s):

set up email sending (anywhere)

bash shortcuts

table of contents:

set up this blog

why static (vs dynamic) sites

mastering BeautifulSoup

how to scrape

set up Reddit API

vocab

vocab

set up Google Sheets APIs (and treat Sheets like a database)

set up Twilio SMS to Email

overview