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)
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: 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: 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: 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: 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)
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
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
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
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)
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
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: 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)
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 …