DEV Community: Eric Carlson

How the Heck Do I Email People I Find on LinkedIn? (for free, of course)

Eric Carlson — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 11:29:47 +0000

So you want to contact some people from the LinkedIn page below. What do you do?

I will show you how you can email anyone on LinkedIn without paying a dime, and without relying on free searches from Email Finder websites like Hunter.io (except as backups). I have emailed thousands of people this way and you can too!

When I see a LinkedIn profile like the one for Mark Rabey (don't know him but love the pic!), this I what I see in my head:

mark@simpplr.com (40%)
mark.rabey@simpplr.com (40%)
markr@simpplr.com (5%)
mrabey@simpplr.com (5%)
Something else (10%)

I open up Gmail and type in the first two emails.

SECOND TRY!

When Gmail shows you a user photo like this, you can be sure that this is a valid email (and that this is the default email pattern for the whole company).

How does this actually work?

There are just two things you have to know to make this process work for (almost) every company.

There are two parts to a work email address like mark.rabey@simpplr.com:

The name (mark.rabey)
The domain name (simpplr.com).

Email Name Patterns

There are only four common email patterns that companies use with employee names nowadays. Yes, I said it, just four! The four I showed above.

You can try all four of them, but the first two are way more common. I gave them an equal chance because Simpplr is a mid-sized company (500 people). Small companies often use just a first name and larger companies usually use two names (for obvious reasons).

Email Domain Names

This one is easy. The email domain is the same as the company website domain.

I like to look in the About tab to confirm the company's domain (or you can Google it).

Just a couple of points to remember here:

In the US, .com is by far the most common ending, but some startups go with an ending like .io.
ALSO, if the company website is something like simpplrapp.com, then the emails will end like that too.
Yes, there are a handful of exceptions, but the vast majority of domains work this way.

Valid emails without a Gmail photo

Okay, we're feeling good about the email pattern at Simpplr now. Let's email the VP, Engineering next!

When I type in the name this time, I only get the default light blue user icon in the To field. Don't panic!

This is another common type of feedback from Gmail for a valid email address. The user icon in the To field is the default light blue, but the user icon in the hover popup has a DIFFERENT COLOR.

Yes, this is subtler than seeing the user photo, but I have never had an email fail after it gets this feedback. This email must be in the company system, but it just doesn’t have a photo associated with it, so Google shows a custom background color instead.

Conclusion

I honestly love email finder websites like Hunter.io - I really do! If I can’t find an email address, the free searches from these sites are lifesavers!

But these companies are not in the business of giving me emails for free. Hunter.io has been particularly aggressive in shutting down common workarounds like using different browsers, Incognito browser windows, and VPNs.

Even if some sites still allow these workarounds, they too are likely to follow Hunter.io’s lead in the future. I can’t blame them for trying to charge money for their service. They scrape a ton of emails from every company in the world, store them in a ginormous database, then allow people to search this data on a public website. This cannot be cheap!

But what is it all for? Why expend this effort and these resources when company emails are so simple?

Email Finder Websites

There will be times when you can't find an email without an Email Finder website. Speed is key when searching for emails, so I don't mess around if I can't find it fast. But what if you use up your free searches on Hunter.io? Here are some things you can still do.

Use a different IP (VPN or cellular) and a different browser or device

Hunter.io shuts me down in ways that I still don't fully understand, but if I switch to my phone (on cellular connection not Wifi) I can always get a new set of free searches.

Use a different Email Finder website

A lot of these sites do not give you free searches, and they often give you the runaround before this becomes clear. At the moment, I use two alternatives to Hunter.io that also give some free searches per month.

anymailfinder.com
snov.io

CTA

Okay, now go and try to send some emails. Write a comment to let me know how it goes! Also, share other Email Finder websites that give free searches if you use them.

How the heck do I use Anki to remember my Codewars solutions?

Eric Carlson — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 19:36:41 +0000

Maybe you’ve been grinding Codewars to work on some fundamental coding skills. Maybe you’ve even progressed into the more advanced questions on Codewars or started doing some LeetCode too. But there’s a problem!

When you go back and look at some of the more basic Codewars challenges, you can’t remember anything about them! Ack!! Codewars has marked them as completed, so you did really solve them, but in the months that have passed, these problems have faded entirely from your memory!!!

I don’t know about you, but I find this situation alarming. What is the point of doing all of these coding exercises if I’m going to forget everything after a few months?

Note - if you are new to Codewars, check out this excellent guide to getting started.

Anki to the rescue

Luckily, there is a simple solution to this memory problem by using a technique called "spaced repetition." Even better, there is a free app that you can use to do spaced repetition called Anki.

Let’s say you have just solved the Reversed Strings challenge using the solution below. (Yes, there are many other ways to reverse a string, but let’s stick to the basics for now.) The question now is how to use Anki so that you never forget this solution.

Adding a Codewars challenge to a flashcard

Just like there are many ways to reverse a string, there are many ways to use the flashcards that you get with Anki. I will show you the way that works best for me, but of course, feel free to experiment with the options that Anki provides.

If you’re new to Anki, there are lots of tutorials to get you started overall. I will focus on the specifics of adding a Codewars solution here.

I like to use the “Basic (type in the answer)” option for my Codewars cards. It works just like the Basic one, but you have the option of typing in the answer, which I find keeps me honest.

Now I go back to the Codewars window and copy the name, the description, and the examples for the challenge.

Paste these items into the “Front” section of the flashcard.

Now go to the Solutions tab in Codewars and copy the full text of the function you want to remember - along with the function name, the curly braces, the return statement, and everything else.

Go back to Anki and paste the function ALSO IN THE FRONT SECTION!! Yes, the Front!! Why, you ask? Read on!

Curating the back of the card

The reason to start on the front of the card is that we want to curate the back of the flashcard very carefully. It may look like a simple step, but selecting what to put on the back of the card is a crucial decision.

As the solutions get a bit longer, the choice of what to put on the back gets even more important. If you put too much on the back, you can slow down your entire daily Anki sessions (and maybe abandon your Codewars cards as a result - horror!). If you put too little on the back, you may not memorize the essential logic of the solution.

How do you pick what goes on the back?

I find that there is no general rule for how many characters or methods to place on the back of my cards, but overall, shorter is better.

If I was learning this function for the first time, there would be two main options for what to put on the back of the card.

Option #1 - Short and sweet

If I was comfortable using split() and join(), and the reverse() method was the thing that I was learning, I would do it like this.

NOTE - There are some fancier ways to handle the "code here" part of it, but I like to keep it super simple.

Option #2 - All three methods on the back

If the whole string of methods was new to me, I would put all of them on the back like this.

The selection is more of an art than a science - it’s about finding what piece of the solution I need to remember better so that I can recall the entire solution better. My understanding and memory of a solution may evolve over time, and if it does, I edit what goes on the back of the card to correspond.

Conclusion

That’s it! The process looks deceptively simple when you look at it like this. It might even seem too simple as you start adding solutions like this one for reversing a string.

But wait until you start adding a new solution every day (or so) and then start drilling these solutions every day (or so). Do this for a month or two, and I think you'll find that this practice starts to expand your memory/knowledge in a surprising and even mind-bending way.

Imagine how much you will memorize in the next year if you do a new Codewars challenge every day and use Anki to remember every one of them!