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356 points joaovcoliveira | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0.844s | source

Hello everyone!

At a company I worked for, we needed to develop an MVP (basically a web page) and apply certain business logic to a Google Drive spreadsheet that was frequently updated by the Sales team.

In this case, we had two options:

Develop a backend to replace the current spreadsheet and have the sales team use it as a new "backoffice" - This would take a very long time, and if the hypothesis we were testing was wrong, it would be time wasted.

Create the web page and use Google's SDK to extract data from the spreadsheet.

We chose to go with the second option because it was quicker. Indeed, it was much faster than creating a new backoffice. But not as quick as we imagined. Integrating with Google's SDK requires some effort, especially to handle the OAuth logic, configure it in the console, and understand the documentation (which is quite shallow, by the way).

Anyway! We did the project and I realized that maybe other devs might have encountered similar issues. Therefore, I developed a tool that transforms Google spreadsheets into "realtime APIs" with PATCH, GET, POST, and DELETE methods.

Since it's a product for devs, I think it would be cool to hear your opinions. It's still quite primitive, but the basic features already work.

https://zerosheets.com

1. uptown ◴[] No.40017294[source]
I used to use a Google Sheet to drive a restaurant website's menu page. It was perfect. The restaurant could update the spreadsheet whenever something changed, and it'd instantly be reflected on the web. If they ever messed something up, they could just revert.
replies(1): >>40020145 #
2. chambored ◴[] No.40020145[source]
A couple of weeks ago, I set up this exact thing for a restaurant. Simple and free. I had app script build the site on updates. So they could edit it any time, it would trigger a rebuild, and redeploy as a static site.
replies(1): >>40047562 #
3. hipjiveguy ◴[] No.40047562[source]
where was the site hosted? Is it available online for us to checkout ?
replies(1): >>40067882 #
4. chambored ◴[] No.40067882{3}[source]
I set it up initially on Vercel, but now I use Firebase because I'm sure it'll be cheaper in the long run.