Surfing with Zapier, part 1
I love board sports - skateboarding, snowboarding, and I was recently in a place where I could do some surfing. So I shouldn't be surprised to find myself skating on top of the data waves and working on integrations and ETLs. I am OBSESSED with the movement of data between systems. Making it happen, watching it happen, looking for the next right wave to ride - the analogies are endless, and I’m loving it.
As an amatuer data surfer, I am sort of in the kiddie pool with the kiddie waves and a kiddie board. The pros are using Python and Visual Studio Code. I’m using the Google Sheets add-on API Connector and Zapier as my low-to-no-code solutions (while I take a Java class to prepare for a Python class so that I can ride with the big kids in the future).
I think I signed up for my first Zapier account at least 10 years ago, and I have really loved it from that very moment. Recently, I built an entire integration between two systems that I am super excited about and will share in a different blog post. The Zapier blog is usually a great read, and in just the past few weeks I received two emails from Zapier that gave me almost completely different reactions.
The first email I got was about a feature request being delivered. Have you ever gotten one of these emails? It felt like Christmas in March! Only problem was, I couldn’t remember why in the world I had put that feature on my present wish list to begin with! But here is a little video of gratitude for that enhancement:
The second email I got was about a celebration of National No Code day. Who would ever have thought a thing like that existed? Anyway, this one sent me on a RANT. I had to send the video of this rant to a few trusted friends first to get their thoughts before I felt comfortable enough to share it. It just really irks me that we call things “no code” when we really mean they are “no code” for the end-user to write. The entire thing is made up of code that someone else wrote, and the end-user contributes to! Check out that rant here:
I love you Zapier, I really do. And like with any good love relationship, we are going to fight. And listen to each other. And become better because of it.
Peace.
