Huy Nguyen

I want to share a technique with you that I have been using to streamline my customer development process. It’s experimental, but so far it’s saving me a lot of time and producing good results.

At the core, my technique involves using MTurk to collect targeted leads for some business ideas that have been brewing in my head. By using MTurk I was able to gather contact information from a huge list of websites in a very little amount of time. Sure, I could’ve written a scraper to find emails on most of these sites, but after weighing the cost/benefit ratio, I figured it just wasn’t worth my time.

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• Pandas – R’s dataframes in Python
  • Pandas is a python package for working with timeseries data. I’ve been looking a long time for an equivalent to R’s dataframe functionality within python and this is it. What makes these dataframe structures so special is their ability to quickly slice and dice a table of data.

• node.js, jsdom and jQuery

  • JSdom allows you emulate the entire document object model of a webpage without running a browser. I just found out today that node.js now runs jsdom and jquery seamlessly. This is nothing short of a webscraping revolution.

• CryptoJS

  • A cryptographic library for Javascript. Perfect use case: Interactive API documentation. Got an api service? Want developers to adopt quicker? Allow them to submit signed API calls within your webpages.

• The MarketPlace Play

  • A detailed analysis of the marketplace business model.

Robust code cries often and loudly as soon as something is not right. It does not cower away in corners of obscurity hoping that no one will notice, until one day, shit hits the fan.

Any serious python code contains proper use of exceptions, errors, and asserts. In fact, I would argue that their presence defines the difference between one-off throwaway scripts and robust library code.

Imagine a python interpreter without these facilities. What would the scenario look like?

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