After I reached a reviewer ranking of less than 80,000 I started getting emails from Amazon sellers asking me to review their products. From an algorithmic standpoint this makes complete sense: products with more (and better) reviews are more likely to be seen by other customers …
If you have an internet connection, there’s a pretty good chance that at some point in time you’ve ordered something from Amazon. Amazon is great for retail consumers, it’s great for sellers, it’s great for software developers (Amazon Web Services), it’s great for affiliate marketers, …
My first impression: My project manager kept saying we should do Selenium tests to increase our unit test coverage on the front end. Our previous experience was with Karma and Jasmine (which was also kind of painful) so we tried to put it off as much as possible in the interest of doing “actual work”
Second take: Oh my gosh this is witchcraft. When you use Selenium you can basically program a ghost of yourself that is better and faster that can interact with your application and notices when things break (as long as you tell it what to notice).
The website for their homepage isn’t impressive (it’s not shiny or flat UI) but the framework is incredible. On our project we’re using it with javascript (it’s an AngularJS/Scala app) and while the initial learning curve is a bit weird, much of what you’re testing (clicking and entering inputs) is repetitive.
Official Documentation
Selenium Web Driver Documentation
Getting Started and Useful Information
This guy has a pretty thorough explanation on how to set up Selenium and the web driver component
50 FAQs about Selenium and Automated Testing
This is a living document – I’ll add or remove resources if they’re found to be helpful (or if someone recommends a good document)
After hitting 1000 followers I didn’t feel any spectacular change or get any life changing epiphanies, but around 1,100 followers I slowly started to notice a confusing pattern emerge: the photos that I was posting weren’t getting the same engagement that they had been getting in …
This morning I woke up to a message from an account I follow on Instagram: Hi Johna! I just read your bio, one of our baristas was born and raised in Alaska also! What a small world. We just had a blogger mixer and are …
Note: There’s no way that this post will be all inclusive or up to date because of the huge scope of the internet and new websites being made every day. Feel free to reach out to me with your favorite websites/strategies if you have them.
Posting photos and being able to see likes and comments is great, and after doing it for a while you’ll be able to have a mental gist of what works and what doesn’t. Having a gist is great, but it doesn’t allow you to quantify the subtle differences (ex: I might know that pictures relating to programming do well, but maybe pictures of computers in coffee shops do better than computers on desks).
I didn’t find this out until this month, but Instagram has a lot of analytics it doesn’t make public in it’s API (this is where other websites are drawing their analytics from). For instance, the Instagram API doesn’t actually share gender of user or how many views a photo gets – if a website offers that then they’re probably trying to sort gender by something like the bio or picture recognition. Continue reading Instagram: Quantifying Impact
On Monday, March 3rd, 2017 I woke up to 1015 followers. This honestly feels a little bit like the last milestone: it’s a good sign but also a little underwhelming. The earth didn’t stop revolving and cheerleaders didn’t come out of my closet – though …
Okay, so you have an account, a smart-phone, and a bunch of pictures of lattes. Now what? Unfortunately, if you’re trying to build a brand posting random pictures from your photo-roll isn’t going to cut it (even if they’re good photos). Generally speaking, people want …
I’ve been putting more effort into Instagram for the past 2 months or so – actually I can tell you the exact post, it was this one:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BL64buBg8xw/
My ultimate goal is to grow a following and aesthetic strong enough that brands want to collaborate with me for marketing purposes. I see it as a uniquely challenging job interview for a position that there’s no clear path to reach. Sure, there are articles everywhere about how to “make your Instagram better” but it’s not so easy to find step by step guidelines of how to do it (see more thoughts on this here). As a data nerd I was and still am very ready to take on the challenge of trying to quantify becoming successful on social media through a method driven by data.
Here I am, two months later, currently with 437 followers, and today I got what I thought would be the Holy Grail of social media marketing for someone looking to grow a following: a repost. At 5am this morning I posted this photo:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPZ6AQmA1GQ/?taken-by=jonesdoeslife
And 8 hours later it was picked up by my absolute favorite online retailer, Look Human: Continue reading Instagram: Getting the repost
Technology and automation has brought us a lot of wonderful things: cheaper cars, digital spreadsheets, and the junk filter on your email. They’ve also brought us something that no one anywhere really enjoys: bots. The two most common bots found on the internet are sex bots …