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I’ve made it used an interface to Google sheets at every company I’ve worked at, and in every case it’s made me a hero to all the non-tech employees. Finally a
by wanderingstan 3y ago
I’ve made it used an interface to Google sheets at every company I’ve worked at, and in every case it’s made me a hero to all the non-tech employees. Finally a UI they understand!
Often previous tech people had to built internal CRUD apps with Byzantine interfaces that trafficked in JSON or YAML files.
But being able to make changes to our app, or import/export data, and all via making changes to a google sheet—this feels like magic.
- tarasyarema 3y agoNice, actually I think the best target for this would be people that poweruse sheets and have some SQL knowledge. I see teams that eventually would develop tools or use data lakes etc instead of sheets, but as a first tool to quickly operate over the initial startup sheet drama I think it could be powerful :D
- hobs 3y agoHow do you deal with the validation problems that crop up, the data entry problems that crop up, and the impedance mismatch between a traditional datastore and the sheet?
- wanderingstan 3y agoGoogle sheets actually has a pretty robust data validation setup (up to regular expressesions), and most business users are fairly good at handling detailed instructions. But yes, for the inevitable times when they get it wrong, you just need some robust alerting system. Having it email/text me when anything goes wrong turned out to still be easier than writing our own CRUD app or fancy interfaces.
- hobs 3y agoI am really glad that worked! I am pretty paranoid about the downstream breakage of things but I probably just need to let go a little more.
- nunez 3y agoit's almost always required. the API for Sheets and its documentation isn't great. when I dug into sheets to make my receipts tracker, I found myself having to transpile their HTTP REST API docs into Golang, which was difficult since Golang has special objects for many kinds of requests you'd make in Sheets.