fstopmick

Thanks for mentioning PMAlerts! If you'd like to connect and try out a leadgen feature (currently in private preview), I'd love to see if we can turn some of the signals you're catching into qualified leads. Feel free to email me if you're interested: [email protected]

Thanks for the shoutout RicoElectrico ^

Link to the post for convenience:

https://www.karma.fm/p/IU6PAnK/nets-and-spears-how-to-use-so...

Hey everyone - this is the dashboard I use to monitor some of the hamsters powering PMAlerts. Happy to answer any Qs you may have.

If you click on the little boxes (task executions), you can see a bit more information about the task.

We have similar backgrounds, and similar struggles. There is light at the end of the tunnel.

FWIW, I'm also about a decade behind-the-curve because of childhood trauma. I'm reminded of it every day - peers within my age group have exceeded me in every imaginable way.

The cool thing though, is that your CS degree is going to empower you with a lethal skillset, whether or not you graduate. Especially if you keep practicing those social skills as you work on your studies.

I know this is a "Tell HN", and I hesitate to offer unsolicited advice. But I'll share with you, what I wish someone would have shared with me:

- Delayed career progression isn't a big deal. Just frame it as an interesting story.

- You can make your story more interesting by learning to love and cultivate your skillset. Maybe reading Atomic Habits inspires you to build a personal habit-tracking application. That sort of thing is a powerful differentiator.

- You probably won't use most of what you're learning in academia. I wish I had supplemented by University studies with a coding bootcamp that taught me how to build real apps for real people.

- Interviewing is a total numbers game. It took me ~20 interviews to get an offer that excited me. My GPA was shit - but my side projects were interesting to the people who handled my interview loop.

- It sounds cliche, but defining a five-year vision (ie - working for a FAANG corp making $>150k/y) can help. You can split those years up into months, and those months up into weeks, and then determine what you should be measuring and working on to meet your targets every week.

I also wanted to thank you for the reminder to take care of my body. I've been getting lazy (easy with gyms closed) and your post was great reminder to resume measuring and improving my nutrition/exercise habits. Much appreciated.

For sure. I have to periodically prune my social media accounts because whenever I hear about the latest atrocity, failure of the system, injustice, etc, I get all fired up and become a wannabe activist who thinks we can change the world with software.

I'll go to bed feeling like I've done my part before waking up to a crippling fear that I've been penalized for criticizing capitalism or the political system or something. It's a constant cycle between "optimistic and morally justified criticism" and "self-censorship" that's frankly exhausting.

How about you?

> How did Tesla manage to create this when GM has been making cars for decades and that is the singular focus of the company?

(replaced the subjects with auto-industry corollaries)

I think it's the power of vertical integrations. When you aren't cobbling together a bunch of general-purpose bits for general-purpose consumers, you don't have to pay as many taxes. Sort of like SRP in software - a multi-purpose function is going to become super bloated and expensive to maintain, compared to several single-purpose alternatives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-responsibility_principl...

Vertical integration is like taking horizontally-integrated business units and refactoring them per SOLID principles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOLID

Hi everyone - just wanted to drop a message here in case you sent me an email and I haven't responded yet.

First - thank you for the super supportive and encouraging vibes here, and for the candid feedback. Really, really appreciate how many improvements are going to be attributed directly to you.

Second - sorry for the delayed responses. I'm working through emails / messages / comments and promise to get back to you - I just don't want to rush through bugfixes and conversations, so it might take longer than I'd like.

Third - There have been a few reports of email verification breaking, and also of features not being fully enabled with Early Adopter subscriptions. This is my bad - the email verification flow didn't take into account case-insensitivity. Should be fixed now (for anyone impacted, you should have a new verification link in your inbox). Features should also be enabled by EOD today - the complexity of feature-by-feature upgrades is coming back to bite me now.

Fourth - I've authored a couple more notes to answer questions that have popped up:

Bizdev strategy / vision: https://www.karma.fm/p/SdjVjdj/the-pmalerts-strategy

How closely does PMAlerts listen?: https://www.karma.fm/p/rk3HI4d/how-closely-is-pmalerts-liste...

Thank you again,

- mick

a sentiment I wholeheartedly embrace

Ooh this is implemented! If you click on "Filters" at the top of any selected alert, you'll see options for keyword filtering, username filtering, and domain filtering. The UI/UX is a bit immature, so if you use it and have any feedback, I'm happy to address whatever friction you hit.

No you don't! You can use PMAlerts without even providing your email if you'd like.

Pleasure to connect, and congrats on the success! I envy your alert times :).

I actually don't scrape all of GitHub (or any platform)... I just simulate a user performing a keyword search and share new results.

Thank you! Most platforms have a combination of "poll via search engines" and "poll natively". Native polling mirrors the functionality of performing a keyword search using the platform's search functionality.

Thanks for the heads up about this

Hey Kevsim - thanks for the heads up and sorry about that - that's a familiar bug that I thought was fixed. I'll try to repro, would love to connect via email to confirm any attempted fixes - [email protected]

Yes, for sure. If you'd like to help me nail down the MVP for this, feel free to send an email ([email protected]). Would love to have some company over there.

I like this a lot. I'll incorporate it - thank you!

Thanks uberneo! I'm using Sendgrid for emails (looking to switch to something with high deliverability, high trust, and easy analytics if you have any suggestions!) and Twilio for texts (super friendly SDKs).

Thanks nyellin - and for sure! If you used the onboarding flow or "result preview" functionality, you'll only see recent Twitter results. But if you create an alert for your personal blog and select "Custom" along with other platforms, you'll be notified whenever someone drops your link AND (important) it isn't shortened by something like bitly.

Thank you! Right now LinkedIn results show you what you'd see from a timeboxed google search, like "ryanr site:linkedin.com", but this will change once I have either 1) time to implement deep native polling, or 2) a service that does it for me (high confidence in 2 becoming available soon).

Thanks very much! And yes it is - I'm using PMAlerts to learn how to listen, and Karma is teaching me how to think and write (though it's a bit less mature)

I'm hearing similar feedback from others on all three items - if you shoot me your email to [email protected] I'll upgrade + verify you manually while I troubleshoot. Thanks for confirming these, and sorry for the headache!

Woohoo! Email is [email protected] if you need anything (a bit behind at the moment, but I generally aim for responses within a day). Would love to connect + learn more about your use-case and general needs/challenges in this space.

Thanks very much! The prototype was a console application I built a little under a year ago (Jan 2020). I've been chipping away at it on nights and weekends since then... maybe about 10 hours per week on average (some none, some double). So ~10 full-time weeks? 9 too many

I haven't, mostly because I'm scared of the liability. My code is pretty sketchy for everything but Twitter, and for that I use LinqToTwitter (.NET) which is already OSS (and amazing).

Ack, thanks for the heads up RE the "register" copy. Just pushed a fix.

Edit: RE the Upgrade button - once that 0 goes to nonzero, it should work. It's poor design on my end, I'll improve the UX asap. Thanks for trying it out, and for the feedback :).

Hmmm... I could have a setting for PMAlerts integrations (slack, teams, discord, zoom) that configures it to not only feed alert results into the app, but to listen to that server's contents for you and only you. A bit tricky with privacy implications, but technically feasible. I'll have a think on it - thanks for the love.

For anyone curious about the services being used to support platform polling, I'm using serpapi.com for the Custom and LinkedIn options on PMAlerts. I highly recommend experimenting with this service - lots of potential gets unlocked as soon as you work around arbitrary scraping limitations that Google throws up. Plus, Julien from serpapi is awesome and super accessible.

Thank you swlkr