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How We Spent $500 on Tech to Ship $2.6M of Soylent

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Re: How We Spent $500 on Tech to Ship $2.6M of Soylent

#11

Post by DanBC »

yen223 wrote: post #4

Does anyone know how to get around that Excel CSV issue, where Excel will "helpfully" convert a number-like value into a meaningless value in scientific notation, even if the number was quoted like "1234"? That was a huge pain point in a previous work that I did.

In the past there would have been a Microsoft Usenet group with "MVPs" (Microsoft Valued Professionals) providing peer support.

I guess the modern equivalent is SuperUser stack exchange?

So far there's this, which doesn't answer the question: http://superuser.com/questions/355108/csv-error-on-phone-num...

And this, which converts numbers into text, but maybe there's an option to keep them as regular numbers not scientific notation?:

http://superuser.com/questions/586306/save-data-exactly-at-o...

> To do this, open Excel first.

> Click on Data > Import from text.

> You will get a window where you'll have to pick the import type. Choose Delimited then next.

> In the next screen, check only comma, then next.

> On this screen, click the first column in the preview box, scroll to the last column. Hold SHIFT and click the last column. This should make all the columns 'black' (you actually selected all the columns).

> Now, click the radio button Text. After that, click Finish and OK to get your data as you wanted it to be!

Re: How We Spent $500 on Tech to Ship $2.6M of Soylent

#12

Post by SQL2219 »

yen223 wrote: post #7
nodata wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't you set the number format on the cell?

It's possible with .xls or .xlsx files, but csv files can't store number formats.

That is why you convert the spread sheet column to a number before you export to csv. The fulfillment center was lazy, when you paste large numbers like that into excel, it auto converts your large number into scientific notation. you simply only have to change the data type of the column and it will change it back to a number. A CSV is dumb, it only exports what Excel displays.

Re: How We Spent $500 on Tech to Ship $2.6M of Soylent

#15

Post by dvdcxn »

onion2k wrote: post #2

This is a really good example of why you need a 'hacker' in your startup, in the traditional 'one who is good at building ad hoc systems' sense. Having awesome technologists who can write brilliant, well-tested and robust code is certainly useful, but a lot of the time in the early stages of a company you just don't have time. You have a problem and it needs to be solved fast . Most things can be fixed later when the…

When you've got a person who can hack a good prototype together and then later use the lessons learned to develop a fantastic quality software system, you're in luck.

Re: How We Spent $500 on Tech to Ship $2.6M of Soylent

#16

Post by ZenoArrow »

yen223 wrote: post #9
scriptman wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you put an apostrophe in front of the number it will store it as text but will appear as a number. Just to be clear - you can then save the xls/xlsx to csv and the csv won't contain the leading apostrophe, but will show the whole number.

If you put the apostrophe in front of a number, and save it as csv, that works. But if you reopen that exact same file, Excel will still misinterpret the number. The issue here was that there's no way to let Excel know that this value in this CSV file is not a number. The only way around it that I know of is to stick with xlsx, which has its own pain points.

Would it still be an issue with TSV? That's my preferred flat file data format, find it less error prone compared with CSV.

Re: How We Spent $500 on Tech to Ship $2.6M of Soylent

#17

Post by nols »

scriptman wrote: post #3

This was really interesting, but it just seems like they chose the wrong fulfilment partner for their warehousing and logistics. I work for a third party warehousing and logistics company in AU, but we specialise in receiving orders from external parties in electronic formats and providing tracking information back to the orderer. People think that warehousing/distribution companies are all the same, but there are a…

Yeah, that does raise the question of why they chose a company that doesn't normally do what they were looking for in a fulfillment center. It never really covers why exactly they chose Heritage Paper over a different company that focused on smaller ecommerce orders instead of freight.

Re: How We Spent $500 on Tech to Ship $2.6M of Soylent

#18

Post by angdis »

hownottowrite wrote: post #8

Summary: "Fulfillment of physical goods is hard, especially when you don't know anything about it."

I agree, but it makes for a good story. It is amazing how much detail goes on behind the scenes in shipping product. A story like this where "logistics outsiders" re-create this stuff from scratch and then write about it is quite entertaining. Good for them, they figured out something that works and had a fun time doing it.

Re: How We Spent $500 on Tech to Ship $2.6M of Soylent

#20

Post by moonbug »

Cool story bro, but it give me hives just reading it. "We didn't know anything about physical order fulfilment so we hacked our way into a local optimum, rather than asking anyone who knew".

Or, as we say hereabouts, a month in the lab solves a day in the library.

But it only cost $500! Well, I'm sure that'll come as a lovely surprise come payday when John discovers he's working pro bono.

Also, that product looks disgusting.

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