Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?

Re:Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as... by paulgb on Sunday April 05, 2020 @02:44PM (#22787490)

Google Sheets can be surprisingly handy as a UI for editing data. For example, I have a job on AWS that scrapes a handful of URLs and snapshots them. Instead of creating a database and hosting it somewhere, or hard-coding them, I put them in a spreadsheet that the AWS job reads at the beginning of every run.

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Re:Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as... by freeqaz on Sunday April 05, 2020 @07:55PM (#22789766)

I just made an example for how to do this using Refinery (most of the pieces were off the shelf using "saved blocks").

https://app.refinery.io/import?q=9lvohdvqd50g

This project will:

- Run every hour (via timer)

- Grab URLs from a Google Sheet

- Go screenshot all of the URLs

- Write each screenshot to an S3 bucket

- Email you at the end after the jobs finish

There is more I could do with this (like trigger an email if something fails, etc). But at least does what you describe above in a (hopefully) succinct fashion!

Also, shill alert as I'm an author for this service (but this was a fun project to build over a few minutes, so thank you).

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Re:Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as... by valtism on Sunday April 05, 2020 @05:58PM (#22789091)

Aren't you forced to use Google Apps Script to interact with Sheets? I remember being forced to use it for interacting with Google Forms API.

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Re:Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as... by dragonwriter on Sunday April 05, 2020 @06:06PM (#22789140)

> Aren't you forced to use Google Apps Script to interact with Sheets?

No, it has a REST API; you need Apps Script if you want automation within Sheets, but you can interact with Sheets without it.

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Re:Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as... by paulgb on Sunday April 05, 2020 @06:58PM (#22789442)

That's the best part, I don't even use an API! I just go File -> Publish to the web, then select "Comma-separated values" instead of "Web page" from the dropdown. Then I use Pandas to read the CSV in Python.

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Re:Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as... by AllanHoustonSt on Sunday April 05, 2020 @03:24PM (#22787835)

I continually find myself amazed with what people can do with Excel.

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Re:Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as... by peschu on Sunday April 05, 2020 @07:17PM (#22789544)

haha yeah and I always wonder why especially engineers are so creative in using Excel as a graphics/painting tool :) Looks good, but a nightmare to read in a programmatic way ^^

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Re:Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as... by thrownaway954 on Sunday April 05, 2020 @04:33PM (#22788457)

How do you get around the number of fetch limitations?

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Re:Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as... by paulgb on Sunday April 05, 2020 @07:00PM (#22789454)

I'm hitting at a rate of 2/hour, it hasn't been an issue.

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Re:Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as... by thrownaway954 on Monday April 06, 2020 @08:16AM (#22793024)

how are you accomplishing that? Does Google sheets have a scheduler built into it? Long running timer?

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Re:Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as... by mneubrand on Wednesday April 08, 2020 @10:37AM (#22813300)

Google Apps Script has a scheduler built in: https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/script/c...

I use this to automate a lot of tasks. E.g. automatically clip supermarket coupons every week, check for tax loss harvesting opportunities in my portfolio, etc.

It's really powerful

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Re:Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as... by paulgb on Monday April 06, 2020 @09:40AM (#22793588)

The scheduled job runs on AWS, it just fetches the sheet when it runs.

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