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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?

#151

Post by karussell »

raverbashing wrote: post #91
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…

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)

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

#153

Post by jerf »

vog wrote: post #130
mathw wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh gosh yes. Companies love their CSV exports! I think the reason is that it lets them make glue - they can take data from something, play with it, analyse it, produce graphs, using tools they understand (almost invariably Excel), and sometimes then import into another system. Yes, my employer's customers like their CSV imports too. If you're looking at a big data entry feature and they ask you how the interface work…

You're lucky. We always try to explain that CSV is a mostly-clean format while XLS and XLSX are a mess. Yet, most of the time customers insist on XLS export, and we are happy if they at least acccept XLSX instead.

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're thinking of something like "CSV as outputted by Excel with the default settings", which may be clean and unambiguous, but is far from the only CSV in the world.

For that reason (and I'm just saying this generally, not targeted at the comment I'm replying to), always use the most mature CSV output library you can find for your stack. Never write your own CSV export code by bashing strings together unless you have no other choice because you're working in some stack that doesn't have or can't use existing CSV libraries.

(You can ignore the RFC for CSV too; it's not "wrong", it's just one particular flavor that was declared long after the horses had left the barn, learned to form a horse civilization, discovered the atom bomb and bombed themselves back to being plain horses again. It barely rises to the level of being "advisory" in practice.)

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

#155

Post by ape4 »

majewsky wrote: post #74
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…

> Another thing which I don't personally love, but I do because I understand industries have differences is just exporting whatever can be exported into .csv files or .xls files where applicable. Working on an in-house application, this has been one of the most common types of requests. "Can we add this field here to the CSV export?" It's a three-minute task for me, but a huge time-saver for the manager of the team u…

But then exporting the CSV into Excel and doing something becomes part of the workflow. That could possibly be better done in the application.

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

#156

Post by manyxcxi »

jerf wrote: post #153
vog wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're lucky. We always try to explain that CSV is a mostly-clean format while XLS and XLSX are a mess. Yet, most of the time customers insist on XLS export, and we are happy if they at least acccept XLSX instead.

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 EXPORTING to XLS/X is usually quite straightforward and makes users happier than getting a CSV often times. Until they start wanting to get crazy with template design and then you get into Excel styling application and you're back to hating it all over again.

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

#159

Post by JoachimS »

p0nce wrote: post #73
sirclueless wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, to follow the diplomatic approach here: Client: "Encrypt our data using the md5 cipher." Consultant: "I will investigate the feasibility of this." ... two days pass ... Consultant: "I have considered your proposal. I believe we should encrypt your data with SHA-256. md5 is insecure, here's several references. SHA-256 is much more secure and more popular. It is a NIST standard, and just as cheap." Client: (probabl…

Except you can't encrypt with a hash function.

Exactly.

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

#160

Post by jenkstom »

ape4 wrote: post #155
majewsky wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another thing which I don't personally love, but I do because I understand industries have differences is just exporting whatever can be exported into .csv files or .xls files where applicable. Working on an in-house application, this has been one of the most common types of requests. "Can we add this field here to the CSV export?" It's a three-minute task for me, but a huge time-saver for the manager of the team u…

But then exporting the CSV into Excel and doing something becomes part of the workflow. That could possibly be better done in the application.

Often it already is. Export from here, import to there. SaaS is more and more common, so the glue needs to get better.
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