Show HN: Serverless Scripting for GitHub, Asana, Airtable, and more | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Serverless Scripting for GitHub, Asana, Airtable, and more

scripts.blockspring.com

66 pointshackerews20 comments

Started playing with it, need to find a good use case. Maybe something like:

- when a trello card is due send me a message on Facebook to tell me to stop watching memes.

- when someone opens an issue on GitHub with a specific keyword send me a slack notification.

- when i get an email from someone (like a client) requesting a quote, open a new card in Trello in the prospective clients board

Any chance to get LinkedIn support?

Here's one I really like:

https://community.blockspring.com/t/starlet-collector-create...

Click to update all the repo star counts in a README.md, and push a new commit.

Trying to understand the concept here. It feels sort of like ifttt or zapier. But different, because the "UI" for creating integrations is spread out on to the 3rd party sites (Github, Airtable, etc)...by injecting the UI with a chrome plugin. As opposed to a central administrative UI.

Is that roughly correct?

Edit: Ahh, not just background integration, but also a greasemonkey like ability to tweak the 3rd party sites as well, right?

Seems mostly like greasemonkey, yeah

This is for building add-ons for GitHub, Asana, Trello, Airtable, Pivotal Tracker, and other productivity apps. And they don't break because they cleanly use that app's API.

The primary features are meant to make API development much better:

- Sign in with X instead of setting up OAuth flows or auth.

- Webhooks are built in, so you don't need a server to catch.

- API docs autocomplete. No need to dig through them.

- It's Serverless. Deploy your add-on on save.

It's inspired by Google Apps Script, the platform that powers all Google Docs add-ons. Hence less like Greasemonkey in that it uses real APIs under the hood, and less like Zapier in that it's for building add-ons instead of event pipelines.

>less like Zapier in that it's for building add-ons instead of event pipelines

Hmm. I'd gotten that impression because of these excerpts from your site:

"When someone stars your GitHub repo, automatically send them a thank you email"

"Blockspring Scripts makes it easy to sync data, build alerts, reports, integrations, and 'if x then y' workflows for the products you use every day"

Thanks, good point. It's more for use-cases like this:

- Build a Mail Merge add-on for Airtable in 2 Minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahG935eGnb4

- Build a Sheets Importer/Exporter for Trello in 60 Seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqcD6Qrc3Ck

UPDATE: changed a bit of content on page to reflect this.

Seems like you rely on the chrome extension to initiate the script? I.e. for the mail merge from airtable, you figure out which page the users is on to know which table to merge from correct?

If so, might I suggest inboxsdk.com for help with your extension dealing with Gmail.

Big fan of Streak! Thanks for the suggestion.

You're right -- since these apps don't (yet) embed our SDK in to their site, we need to get the current state (eg current page, selected table, etc) from the Chrome Extension. But our goal is to provide entire entire extensibility platform in an embeddable JS snippet, so hopefully that won't be the case long.

Unfortuantely it might be difficult to convince Google to include your script inside their apps :)

Other than our InboxSDK, you could also look into building a gmail addon and having your users install that, but it would be another install in addition to your chrome extension.

Isn't Gmail enabling Google Apps Script-based add-ons soon (or already)?

Yes exactly what I was referencing. But users install them independently if your chrome extension.

What are the security risks of using a tool like this? How do I know that you're not secretly siphoning off the data from these apps?

I’d like to know this as well. Thank you.

Good question. You'll need to trust the company behind this, and make sure the scopes they're requesting are reasonable. Similar to any other app you use that asks you to "sign in with x". Luckily here, the company behind this (https://www.blockspring.com) is used by thousands of businesses, so a safe bet.

Trusting my content is another matter.

Am I the only one more excited about the built-in slack integration in the browser on that page? https://www.joindowntown.com seems really cool.

Annoyingly Slack didn't let this get published in their app store. Too similar in functionality to Slack itself.

Any pricing info? couldn't find it on the scripts side, and neither on the main site...

It's free for developers. Has a limit on compute time, but most usecases won't run into it.

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