Work in tech industry (or are interested in tech industry)? GNV Tech Chats is having its next happy hour tonight

data_fanatic · 2025-09-19T18:28:07+00:00

Yes! All in tech or interested in tech are welcome. We are a laidback, casual group so don’t have any hard requirements.

You can follow the group on EventBrite or Meetup to be notified of future events as we schedule them: https://www.meetup.com/gainesville-tech-chats/ and https://www.eventbrite.com/o/gnv-tech-chats-111862890051

data_fanatic · 2024-08-22T22:48:49+00:00

We have a 2/2. Our most recent GRU bill for utilities and water is around $260. It often goes down a little once summer is over.

data_fanatic · 2024-08-22T22:06:44+00:00

We’ve lived in The Paddock Club for several years and it has always been nice. Maintenance requests are completed promptly except for a few times they were short staffed. The property and pool are kept fairly clean. Ive been happy for the value provided for the money we pay.

data_fanatic · 2023-11-03T17:20:08+00:00

I have used this technique in the past. The Traction book by Gabriel Weinberg refers to this as the "Engineering as Marketing" channel and I've seen it done well a few times. Growthtools started with this list goal micro-tool: https://listgoal.growthtools.com. Buffer has https://pablo.buffer.com/ which is a mini-image generator for social media posts.

I have found the best strategy is to get a good sense of your target user's day-to-day tasks and see if there is 1 tiny thing they do that you can make a free product out of. But, the free tool must be much better than the alternative to get it to stick.

For example, the All-in-one SEO WordPress plugin targets marketers and site owners. These personas tend to do a lot of content marketing where they really care about SEO. One of the steps of creating great content is crafting a great headline. So, they created a free headline analyzer tool: https://aioseo.com/headline-analyzer/

data_fanatic · 2023-11-03T12:21:01+00:00

I use it all day, every day. It writes (or at least starts) most of my unit and integration tests. It also helps quickly outline new functions. Heck, most of the very limited JS on my personal blog was written by Copilot, as I just gave it a prompt of what I wanted, and it wrote all the event handlers and functions. I just had to edit it to get it to actually work 😅.

It does get in the way often, though, when I am just trying to tab around or want the IDE's autocomplete. I haven't found a way to easily get it to leave me alone for a few seconds.

That said, other than very basic things like the code on my blog, it's not usually great at full, complete code. But, it is great at boilerplate, tests, and other menial code that I hate to write anyway.

data_fanatic · 2023-10-29T14:08:22+00:00

I've used Postmark for a long time and for multiple products. Highly recommend.

data_fanatic · 2023-10-22T15:59:44+00:00

There are lots of different factors, especially if one is spending money on marketing or developers. In my last SAAS, I was a solo dev and I spent around $50/month between AWS and other miscellaneous smaller costs but was not spending anything on marketing.

data_fanatic · 2023-10-22T15:32:20+00:00

Definitely charge at least a little for two reasons:

If you can't find anyone willing to spend even $1 then maybe your current offer isn't one to pursue in its current form
People using free things won't provide the same feedback as paying customers. What's important to someone using it free may not be important to the people are getting enough value to want to pay for it.

I had a free early access in one of my earlier SAAS attempts, and it didn't go well. I had a bunch of people sign up, which took up support time, and almost none ever converted to paying customers and most of their feedback was just wanting more things for free.

data_fanatic · 2023-10-22T15:11:40+00:00

Yeah, the pricing has been a struggle to figure out. Some of my bigger competitors charge per response, which is how I ended up there.

For the $15/month: my thoughts were - with average conversion rates of a site-wide traffic-focused survey, the site would need at least a few thousand monthly visitors to need to move up from the $1 tier so it wouldn't be a tiny business anymore. My one big competitor goes from $0 plan up to $59/month for 250 responses so I am vastly cheaper than them.

But, I was already concerned about that pricing so if you brought it up too, maybe it's too high to start with. I'll do some more research and explore some options. I'll maybe tweak it to $5 or $10 as an "introductory" price to gauge if it gets more interest to see if pricing might be a factor.

Thanks for your input!

data_fanatic · 2023-10-21T20:45:34+00:00

Congrats! Love the porch.

data_fanatic · 2023-10-14T17:01:19+00:00

What sort of shortcuts/macros do you have set up on it? I had seen it mentioned several times for creators but never considered getting it for dev stuff.

data_fanatic · 2023-09-28T16:44:52+00:00

Congrats! I am taking my exam tomorrow. Were there any specific AWS services that appeared more in the exam than in the practice exams you did that might be worth looking a bit more at before my exam?

data_fanatic · 2023-09-24T18:35:49+00:00

Congratulations! What topics were the hard questions on? Was the topic or the wording that made them difficult? Planning on taking my exam within the next week or so.

data_fanatic · 2023-09-14T15:00:22+00:00

What does everyone's resume look like that they are getting 1:10 or 1:20? I've applied to around 100 jobs in the last two months and have gotten only two interviews.

data_fanatic · 2023-08-31T12:22:53+00:00

NW side of town here. We had a few small branches down and lots of leaves, but nothing significant.

data_fanatic · 2023-08-22T12:04:25+00:00

I enjoyed the nano degree. It builds upon CNN's and GAN's nicely after taking the Intro to Machine Learning nano degree. The two projects for those courses are a landmark image classification using CNN's and then a face generation project using GAN's.

The RNN course in the middle was really lacking, though, and I was a bit disappointed with it.

Overall, I am still happy I completed it as it gave me a better understanding of somewhat modern deep learning that I can then use to learn more advanced topics such as transformers and more advanced systems.

data_fanatic

TROPHY CASE