So you want to learn how to code?
So you think you want to learn to program but don’t know what to do next? Here are some easy ways to start.
Recent Insights
Instagram: How a Hiatus Affects Your Stats
It’s been about 9 months since I started my Instagram experiment, and if there is one thing I’ve learned it’s this: purposefully maintaining an Instagram account is really hard. From having the time to constantly produce unique content to keeping up with interactions, it’s an …
Instagram: Why your Direct Message isn’t getting a reply (and how to change that)
The magic of Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook is that the people who you choose to follow often aren’t celebrities, they’re just normal people you have something in common with who are sharing parts of their lives. Maybe you like their photography style, or their careers, or the way they use certain words. Maybe it’s that girl who you went to elementary school with who posts all her life drama (and you follow it like a soap opera) even though you haven’t spoken in 10 years. Whatever the reason you follow them, the mere act of following them makes you feel closer, makes you want to reach out.
When you message someone for the first time who doesn’t follow you, your message doesn’t go directly into their inbox and they may not even get a notification for it. It goes into a filtered folder and opens up a request (similar to a ‘spam’ folder on email):
- At that point the receiving person can decide to either ‘accept’ or ‘reject’ the message
- Accepting can’t be revoked, so accepting the message means that from then on the person will be able to see when you were last online and the only way to revoke this is to actively block an account
- These messages expire after approximately 3 weeks if no action has been taken
- If the person does not respond in 3 weeks, it’s likely they can’t even see your message anymore
- The ‘unread’ number maxes out after 100+
- If a person does not actively check this folder they likely don’t even know they’re getting new messages
This mechanism is a kind of privacy and safety net so random strangers can’t harass you and force notifications to come up on your phone. As your follower count grows, the number of messages in this outer-inbox increase and you have to develop a way to figure out how/if you’re going to monitor this folder, what messages to accept, and what to let expire.
If you’ve ever messaged an Instagram account and wondered why you never got a response, it might be because of these*:
*Disclaimers:
1. These are guidelines and observations based on personal anecdotes over the past 6+ months running a personal account on the topic of technology. I do not offer professional services via Instagram.
2. Volume is an important factor here, if an account has over 10k followers and receives 50 new DMs a day, accepting all of those messages (every day) and keeping up with those conversations is logistically not feasible for a single person. Choosing to not accept messages isn’t a personal statement, it’s time management.
Continue reading Instagram: Why your Direct Message isn’t getting a reply (and how to change that)
Amazon Reviews: Talking to Bots
There are few things that are more frustrating in life than having a problem and not feeling like you’re being heard. It’s even worse when a company sends a robot or auto-generated message your way. While Amazon says it’s trying to fix this, it’s hard to …
Instagram: “Let’s Collaborate” : The Instagram Influence Marketplace
In profiles across Instagram of blossoming Instagrammers you’ll see in their bio lines: “DM for collabs” “Serious business inquiries only” “Email xxx@example.com for collaborations” But what does collaborating actually mean?
Instagram: Getting the Repost (vol. 2)
I posted a while back about how I was reposted by a large clothing company and, to my disappointment, it resulted in much less attention than I expected. This experience has been repeated on multiple occasions, but it’s also been challenged.
Earlier this year I responded to a girl’s story on Instagram (it was about guys being jerks to her about being a programmer) with the words “Thank you” which prompted her to look at my profile and message me. She’s a fellow software developer and has a rather large following on Instagram. For whatever reason she liked my profile, screenshotted it, and shared it with her followers
I was a little in awe that she responded to my innocuous message in the first place, so to see her post about my profile completely floored me. That’s also when I began getting bombarded with followers who were obviously checking out my profile from her link. For the next 24 hours every time I opened up Instagram I had a ridiculous number of notifications.
After the Instagram story timed out (after 24 hours) my daily follower average returned back to normal and I went on my way with about 500 more engaged followers.
What made this different than the first big repost?
I have a theory that there are two kinds of accounts:
- There are accounts you follow because you like the photos (the aesthetic, the photography, the brand, etc.)
- And there are accounts you follow because you like the stories (smaller businesses and people)
People feel connected to the accounts that make it feel “personal” – whether it’s because you have the same job or like the same things. When a “personal” account does a repost or gives a shoutout, it’s more like a personal introduction to a friend: “Hi, this person is cool, you should check them out”
If a brand/aesthetics-based account gives a shoutout their followers may or may not respond to it based on if they like that specific photo, product, or idea. The followers may not feel like they “need” to follow someone else if it’s the same aesthetic as the brand because they’re already following the brand.
Amazon Reviews: How Amazon Encourages its Own Black Market
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 …
Amazon Reviews: Strategy
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, …
Selenium
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)
Instagram: Hitting above the target
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 …