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Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

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Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#201

Post by Piskvorrr »

thibaut_barrere wrote: post #178
raverbashing wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you export it to xls? ActiveX Excel controller ("in my time this was called COM", etc)? Open source library?

One useful trick is that you can rely on the headless version of LibreOffice to do the conversion, here on Mac for instance (but also work on Ubuntu with a slightly different call): /Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice --headless --convert-to xlsx file.csv Note, though, that some conversion errors can still occur (I've seen one personally a long time back).

This works for many other formats, too: anything to PDF, for example.

A resource hog, though - had to close it off into its own container, lest it gobble up all available RAM.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#202

Post by wolfgang42 »

bartoszhernas wrote: post #182
cperciva wrote: post #86

If there's a Tarsnap outage because I screwed something up, I give Tarsnap users a credit to their accounts... without waiting for them to complain. Apparently this is unusual. I can't imagine doing it any other way; I mean, who wants to deal with thousands of emails from customers who are owed account credits?

It is wonderfull product, I love simplicity of it. One question though, why don't you allow me to set up recurring billing? Eg. if credits go below 10€, charge 10€.

I got an email last week that I had only $ 0.115755044102126754 left in my account. The last time I paid was $10.00 in June 2015. I'm guessing that I'm fairly representative of most of Tarsnap's customers; for $10 charges once every year and a half recurring billing seems a bit silly.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#206

Post by lotyrin »

SXX wrote: post #107
chrisbennet wrote: post #101

I don't know if these things "blow them away" but I do think they are differentiators: - I bring homemade cookies to our first meeting and if the client likes them, to subsequent meetings. The first time I did this for purely selfish reasons; I like cookies but I'll eat the whole batch myself unless I get someone else to "take a cholesterol bullet" for me. - I'm extremely honest and forthcoming. I tell them that it m…

Looks like a good strategy to find the job you're going to enjoy, but is it working well for you in the long run? Or you just have enough savings at bank to not rush until you find a good position? Since I wish to find some non-freelance job in future, but requirement of bullshit talk scares me. And few times when I attempted to act similar to what you posted I just bumped into a wall of misunderstanding.

I find honesty gets misunderstood pretty often, like I must still have some angle but they just can't figure out what it is.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#207

Post by thirdreplicator »

swalsh wrote: post #176
Zyst wrote: post #48

Most of these seem to be very on the side of "I'm a company", so as a sole developer what I like to do for clients is implementing sockets into their apps. Adding sockets for, say, the 3 newest logs they get in real time. Or if they have anything that maps to a graph/app-overview just make sure that will always update in real time. It's not a huge time investment for me. Customers usually never request it specificall…

I'm thinking about starting a consulting company next year. I've been in an engineering role for over 10 years, but I really want to move into a role where I'm not selling my time in exchange for code, but rather selling the value my code creates. I'm curious how you got your first few "gigs". What should the sales process actually look like? Did you cold call, or did you have enough established relationships first?…

If you really want to reap the value your code creates start an internet-like business with the code that you write. All the value is yours! :)

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#208

Post by barrkel »

manyxcxi wrote: post #156
jerf wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But CSV isn't a mostly clean format. It's a collection of dozens of formats, some of them clean, some of them not, and with no way of labeling which one of the dozens you have in the file itself. Whereas XLS and XLSX, for all their binary cruft, are at least capable of unambiguously (AFAIK) representing, say, a string with a quote and a newline in it. (If there are encoding issues, well, same with CSV.) I suspect you…

XLS and XLSX are neither clear nor unambiguous and I would take 12 CSV formats over either any day. I actually haven't ever met anyone who seriously had to extract data from XLS/X frequently that didn't revile it for its ambiguities. Not to mention the ways that the application munges the user input prior to saving it, leaving the biggest ambiguity of all, what the heck is ACTUALLY in that cell. EDIT: I will add that…

The single biggest problem is date / time formats.

Excel encodes dates and times as floating point numbers. The date / time-ness of a cell is encoded in its format. Some of the formats are hard-coded, some float depending on locale, and some use explicit format-pictures embedded in the styles.

But of course there's no guarantee that the user has formatted a cell with a date as a date. Sometimes the user has pasted a US-format date into a copy of Excel running in a UK locale, so dates that fit have day and month swapped, while dates that don't fit show up as strings. This is non-trivial to handle in the general case. I've had to add customer-specific workarounds for this case in particular.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#209

Post by haldean »

karussell wrote: post #151
raverbashing wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you export it to xls? ActiveX Excel controller ("in my time this was called COM", etc)? Open source library?

For Java there are at least two good solutions: https://poi.apache.org/ and https://github.com/plutext/docx4j/ (or JExcelAPI)

+1 for Apache POI; we actually used that at Google for exporting XLS reports for ads.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#210

Post by Cerium »

chrissnell wrote: post #190

My answer here is more relevant to an e-commerce company but the basic idea can be adapted to any company. So, back in 1994, my dad and me started an ecommerce company (bikeworld.com) that sold bicycle parts online. It was an extension of his brick-and-mortar bicycle business and I took a couple of years leave from college to help him build it. He did one thing early on that generated amazing word-of-mouth support: s…

Thanks for the story. Advanced Circuits (aka 4pcb.com) includes a package of microwave popcorn with every prototype order—since they know you will be up all night when the package arrives.
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