A Little Code Goes A Long Way

Over the last few months my day to day has been dramatically different than the previous 10 years. I’m finding myself doing less coding and more random things. But having the background and experience to quickly put together a python script has unlocked a few things that have shocked my co-workers.

One of my recent accomplishments has been in building sales leads. The internet contains a lot of this information, but there are many problems that need to be overcome to use it:

1. know that the information you want exists somewhere and being able to find it.
2. Be able to get at the information – pull it from HTML, reverse engineer the APIs, hack the JSON out of dev tools.
3. clean and reformat the data into another format
4. use additional tools to enrich
5. import data into platforms so that it can be actionable

For getting sales leads I was able to find lists of from some competitors, and from Google Maps search, enrich that data with some missing data like phone numbers and websites using the Google Maps APIs then push that into other SaaS apps that find additional emails and contacts for those leads and finally push those into hubspot to be worked on.

I have ended up doing several other things to deal with peculiarities e-commerce datasets, grouping things, eliminating double counting of others. Things that are not built into standard dashboards and analytics tools. Python and Pandas has enabled a few interesting points of analysis.

Who would have thought I’d deploy Airflow again and write scripts to push data into Google Data Studio so soon after getting away from that kind of work.

Ever since my first software development job doing MatLab at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans programming has felt like magic. It can take an onerous task and complete it in milliseconds.

At times knowing how to code feels like a super power.