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Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app

(www.zerosheets.com)
356 points joaovcoliveira | 2 comments | 12 Apr 24 16:29 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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

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seanhunter ◴[13 Apr 24 06:46 UTC] No.40021079[source]▶
Just beware of the modern version of the "Excel noob trap" which lots of investment banks fell into in the 80s and 90s. Spreadsheets are amazing generic calculating frameworks and you can do a ton in them, so a lot of banks ended up building a huge ediface of excel spreadsheets that ran a wide variety of risk, pricing and operational functions.

With a few plugins and extensions you can really do amazing things with this type of setup. The problem is that your spreadsheets basically become an unmaintainable and impenetrable nightmare and all your business logic is held hostage in various people's personal sheets. Making wide changes becomes hard/impossible and doing something that in a traditional software framework would be easy ("Let's change the frobnicator to twizzle first and then twozzle afterwards, instead of the other way round as it does it now") become very difficult requiring many many changes in many many sheets with a lot of risk, and a lot of dilligence to be sure you have actually made a particular critical fix everywhere.

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Maxion ◴[13 Apr 24 07:01 UTC] No.40021132[source]▶
Sadly many companies WANT to be in the excel trap...
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Yiin ◴[13 Apr 24 11:09 UTC] No.40022220[source]▶
Can you elaborate? I understand the reasoning "we need to grow no matter the cost, will deal with problems when they arise", but deliberately sabotaging yourself doesn't sound reasonable.
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1. gremlinunderway ◴[13 Apr 24 12:42 UTC] No.40022786[source]▶
not op but probably because some people are so used to using spreadsheets that even if you built them a database with custom visualizations, they'd ask for spreadsheet export.
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2. fendy3002 ◴[13 Apr 24 14:44 UTC] No.40023474[source]▶
Not op but that's one of a milder example. Some management people prefer the look and feel administration to be excel-like, even able to do data modification like excel.

Some even worse that they require the data to be in excel since that's all they know.