81–90 of 273 posts
This was hilarious and utterly relatable. I've also built a lot of one-off tools for my pharmacist girlfriend (now wife - she learned SQL with me ;) Congrats on the launch and the joining accelerator, hope it gains traction! It looks fantastic!
My usual approach when I reach the limit of my excel skills (and patience) is to save as csv, write a Python script to do the job, import back in excel for the graphs. This looks like it could nicely streamline the process, granted I learn a bit of C# (any excuse to pick up a new language I guess). Looking forward to try the tool the next time I battle a budget forecasting file. And kudos for the well-written and fun…
@anakic That was an enjoyable read! I have also tried qutting my job as a developer, tried making money by working for myself (and focusing on developing features instead of actually making money, same as you), then returning to a "proper job" as an engineer. There were many recognizable moments in the blog post. I once took a course in entrepreneurship, as a distraction from computer science, and the bottom line is…
But, as a developer, it's soul-wrenching and just feels wrong to try to sell something before something proper has even been made. This has been my biggest struggle.
You imagine the potential buyer as a hyper-critical power-user that will expect everything to be perfect.
But what if the above isn't true at all? What if the potential buyer is buying something more abstract? Like a solution to a problem; or even the chance at future resolution of a painful problem?
And what if they aren't power users? But just need basic help today that could grow into something better tomorrow?
Like, what if they just need a partner to help them solve a painful part of their work, and would be willing to put up with a lot of incomplete stuff to get that?
In that case, reaching out to them to "sell" them in the early days is basically saying "Hey, I'm starting to build XYZ that solves problem ABC. My goal is that it would help by doing DEF. Do you have that problem? I'm early on in the process, and looking for lots of feedback from potential users. Would you be interested in checking out my prototype / designs / thinking on this?"
That doesn't seem "soul-wrenching" or disingenuous or anything like that. It feels very authentic. You're making yourself somewhat vulnerable and portraying yourself as eager to learn and help.
IMO early stage entrepreneurship consists of finding a problem bad enough that non-trivial amount of people say "sure, let's talk" to that pitch and then working with those early users to build something useful.
@anakic That was an enjoyable read! I have also tried qutting my job as a developer, tried making money by working for myself (and focusing on developing features instead of actually making money, same as you), then returning to a "proper job" as an engineer. There were many recognizable moments in the blog post. I once took a course in entrepreneurship, as a distraction from computer science, and the bottom line is…
I think that there's a rising "Maker" culture that focuses on building first and launching fast. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6reLWfFNer0
I really like this guy's tenacity and clever use of excel. But from my experience you can use excel files as an ODBC database source (Windows). https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15844633/using-excel-as-... Once you create your ODBC source from the excel files, you can run queries and use the language of your choice (Python,C# ....). I am pretty sure you can also insert/update rows and columns too. Wondering how thi…
See the Dropbox HN argument. Polish.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Primarily, it's a lot more convenient. There's no setup involved, you just click and and the data is available through SQL or C#. There's no need to clean the data around the tables, it works on live data (file does not need to be saved), no connection strings to set up or boilerplate code to write. There's more, e.g. the SQLite engine can interact with Excel and fiddle with formatting, but I think the major thing is…
Are you ever worried about Microsoft a feature that acts similar in a future version of Excel? It's a problem that has bit others before (Firebug, Growl, tabbed-browsing extensions for IE).
That was a fantastic read. In a world of products and apps that seem to be a solution looking for a problem, it's nice to see a full story illustrating a common problem, and how a technical person came to provide a featured solution to that problem. I think I already know the answer to this, but I assume that this IDE is Windows only? I couldn't see any information about platforms on the main product page, which migh…
Glad you enjoyed it! I think I know what you assume and I assume you assume correctly. Windows only so far, Excel for Mac doesn't have VSTO:(