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alanng

111 karma · joined July 30, 2018

Humbled app developer. Love playing badminton and eating steak. Usually not at the same time.
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alanng··on One does not simply 'pip install'
Omg this is so true! I installed a package globally, but then my interpreter was using another version of python, which doesn't have the installed package. It took me an hour to find out about this. What a waste of time.
alanng··on Gen Z Netiquettes
not sure if some temporary generational convention can make it to RFC lol
alanng··on Show HN: Dbdocs – Document database lightning fast with DSL code
Hello my fellow developers,

I built dbdocs to relieve the pain of spending centuries documenting database and maintaining such documents.

A little bit of background: I used to work at a fast-growing tech agency. There were a lot of new projects daily, so I was constantly involved in designing and documenting new database.

It was a PAIN to do this by Google Docs - the formatting is just terrible, and navigation is extremely hard. After a long time, the document becomes messy and I felt panicked every time I receive a request to change a field's name or its metadata (which happened A LOT...)

Also, drawing charts in Docs (or even in Lucid Chart) is painful. They are not designed to display ERD and so the experience takes a lot of time and learning. Again, after some time, the ERD in Docs just get uncontrollably large.

So I decided to build this tool with the support of my colleagues. My initial requirements are simple: - Must be easy for me to generate. I hate spending time tweaking and editing on Word → I decide that I MUST use code to generate it. - Must be business-friendly. The generated result must have a clear and friendly format so even non-tech people know what is what.

And here it is, a beta launch today. I believe many people out there are having the same problem. Hope that this little product can help you find some inner peace!

alanng··on Show HN: We wrote a book to help data people build scalable analytics stacks
This is just the book I need!

A little bit of context: I am a product manager and I have been working with data analysts and engineers for a few months, and even though I have tried to do a lot of research, sometimes I still don't understand what they said.

Terms are extremely difficult and varied depending on the site, and it seems like each company will have a different perception for one term.

So that's where this book comes in handy. It helped me visualize the big picture of the whole data analytics landscape. What's more, I understand what the role and challenges of the data analysts and data engineers in my team are. I was able to communicate with them in their "language", especially when I was explaining why we should use ELT instead of ETL (Chap 3, I suppose)

Anw, I think this book is great for non-tech people like me, but it requires certain experience in the tech industry to get started with. Definitely recommend for other PMs who will be working with data people!

alanng··on Show HN: Summerian – A book summary app built with “Eureka effect”
Hello HN folks, I’m Alan, co-founder of Summerian, a book summary app.

I have used a lot of book summary services before and the biggest pain point for me is that the summaries are either too simple or are cut off so excessively that I couldn’t understand the subject.

Therefore, my team and I tried to make summaries that have nothing but very high-quality content that can spark an “aha” moment in any reader. To achieve that, we spent a majority of our time working on the summary framework and intensive quality-check rounds. Summerian is born out of such passion. It’s currently available on iOS, TvOS, and Web, and will be on Android very soon!

I’d love to hear your thoughts, especially about the content of the summaries. Are they comprehensive and enlightening enough?

alanng··on Ask HN: Best solutions for keeping a personal log?
For Automation maybe you could try IFTTT to pull data from one service to a google spreadsheet. Since it has dates associated with the data, you can later match them with your current dataset.

I know a service called exist.io that does a quite similar thing based on API. You can check that out if a central hub for all personal information is what you're after!

Cheers!

alanng··on Merry Christmas HN
I didn't realize this!
alanng··on Merry Christmas HN
Merry Christmas makers! My wish for HN this year is the ability to redirect to a website rather than to a post, then I have to click it manually (I'm using iPhone)
alanng··on Merry Christmas HN
A little bit ... "redder", right?
alanng··on Show HN: ZenJournal – Fast journal app with chat interface
The biggest concern of me with journals is that I'm always afraid that one day the developers will stop developing it, and all my data will be gone.

Therefore, I choose some reliable names like Evernote or Wordpress to store my thoughts there. Although agreeably, they are not fast and smooth, they provide reliability. How do you plan to solve this?

I believe many people have the same concern as me because personal thoughts are very important.

alanng··on Show HN: Habitify – Form habits from any device (iOS,macOS,WatchOS,Android)
Definitely! After we are done with the native versions :)