tejaskumthekar

Applying for the O-1A visa requires satisfying at least 3 out of 8 criteria, and one of the most approachable is “judging the work of others.” But actually getting credible judging opportunities—and tracking them—is tedious and unstructured.

When I was working on my petition, I spent way too much time manually searching for hackathons and competitions, writing cold emails, and organizing responses. It felt like a bad CRM built in Google Sheets.

To solve this, I built https://judging.exalien.club — a lightweight tool to discover relevant events, apply to judge, and track your outreach. It also generates email drafts tailored for each event.

I originally built this just to help myself, but figured it might save others some time too.

Would love feedback—or to hear how others handled this part of their O-1A process.

Chrome extension that solved a couple of everyday problems from a single view:

a. Controlling YouTube. I used to have a hard time finding the YouTube tab midst a bunch of open tabs, and if someone would approach me at my desk (good old days when we had offices with people) I didn't want to open the tab to pause the song (or to play it again, or to go next/previous) so this extension would find the tab and show me a simple UI to control it. I later on extended it to be controllable via a hosted URL which I could put in an Android app. This was helpful because if I had to ever leave the desk and song accidentally played out loud, I can pause it from the phone. b. Controlling Jenkins. I had a bunch of builds running and it was painful to visit and see the status, again, amidst all the tabs.

Gotcha! I think easiest way would be a. You'd configure Mailchimp details (api key etc) inside Courier's provider/integrations interface b. Invoke Courier API and Courier would route it to Mailchimp

["a" can be any integration Courier supports - so it could be Twilio for SMS for instance] ["b" changes based on how you invoke the API - so you could do send just an email via Mailchimp, send just an SMS via Twilio OR both email and SMS OR SMS if email fails and so on --- this logic is configurable via both UI and API]

well the cost to build the architecture orchestration is where the real "value" is

[Disclaimer: I am an engineer at Courier]

Hey hey! yep I think Courier can totally be a good fit! Do you have a way to expose any plugin-like interface which can connect to external services? I'd be more than happy to contribute! Feel free to reach out anytime :)

Hey this is Tejas. I remember exploring the product and chatting with Jess way back in August 2020. Great to see Ditto here on HN. Congrats on the launch :)

Based on my experiences, in the very beginning of your day at the office, I'd recommend to tackle the work item which has the most odds of being completed in a certain time frame.

Let me elaborate - If you have a TODO list of N work items that could belong to one or more of - Set A - require more thinking Set B - require larger communication overhead Set C - have a clear go-to strategy and can be broken into multiple items

Then, picking up the items more inclined to Set C right after you reach the office might be a good strategy. The obvious reasons are a. you know what to do and b. you know how much time its going to take