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.
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 :)
Thanks for the help. I'm just trying to think about how it'd work.
It's probably more useful for the cloud version of our product, thinking about it more. At least if we're using Courier primarily to notify leads/customers.
In that case, would it make more sense to integrate Courier as a separate service or pipeline for managing engagement? Where is the line between something like MailChimp and Courier?
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]
Ahhh, okay thank you for clarifying. The "stacked notifications", especially if something fails, makes total sense. That is what made it "click" in my head where Courier fits in the stack.
I remember Troy explaining this when we spoke about picking the best "channel" to actually reach somebody, but I guess I forgot.
> Where is the line between something like MailChimp and Courier?
Mailchimp has two services: a marketing tool for e.g. newsletters and a transaction email service (previously called Mandrill). Most customers use Courier alongside marketing tools like Mailchimp's newsletter tools - we're more for your active users, not marketing to potential users.
We do integration with Mandrill / Mailchimp Transactional to add our orchestration, preference management, routing, templating, etc. tools so that you don't have to build those yourself on top of their pipes.
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
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.