The blog of Zapier, an automation service that connects web apps, with guides on remote work and tooling.
Commenters point to Zapier as a way to connect apps and replace webhooks, such as with Airtable, and it appears in YC-era job posts.
> So write a conversion tool that parses the file format; if it's sheet music, the format isn't going to be too hard to decipher.
I appreciate your optimism. NoteWorthy Composer was first released in 1994; last I looked was around 2011. It looks like that year, after I stopped looking because I was no longer singing with the group using binary .nwc files, MIT's Music21 project started scraping together beginnings of a parser. (Also, sometime around 2007, the software authors voluntarily added a text export format. That doesn't count, because it depends on the goodwill of the software authors, just like the web services being decried.)
If it took fifteen years for someone to decipher the format, and it only started being slightly parseable in the modern web API era where we've supposedly left scripting behind, I don't think you can claim either that it "isn't going to be too hard to decipher," nor that we're losing anything in our modern era.
(Also, like, my memory of software in the '90s is that in several cases the authors went out of their way to add obfuscation or anti-tampering features to their data formats.)
> How is this any different, other than scale, than the "web APIs" you claim solve the author's complaints?
I didn't claim that they solve the author's complaints. I claimed that it makes no difference whether the software is web-based or local.
Your Mac vs. PC distinction is much the same. Some web services are pretty good at this; some aren't. If this is a…
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For the past two years, Zapier has been helping people across the world automate the boring and tedious parts of their job. We do that by helping everyone connect the web applications they already use.
We believe that there are jobs that a computer is best at doing and that there are jobs that a human is best at doing. We want to empower businesses everywhere to create processes and systems that let computers do what they are best at doing and let humans do what they are best at doing.
We believe that with the right tools, you can have 10X the impact with less work.
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> I have to write an IDE as well as the language
This part caught my attention. I've developed a few small languages over the years, with somewhat boring syntax in Lisp or Algol family. The one that has the most longevity (~7 years) and traction (estimated few thousand users) is an XML-based (!) domain-specific language. Frankly it's verbose and kind of ugly, but apparently easy to learn due to its regular, minimal syntax - a little like Lisp, if parentheses were brackets. It's also "declarative", a bit like SQL, in that the users describe the result, and magic happens internally to make it so.
More recently, I've been working on a tree-structured editor for users to visually build programs/templates. Developing it has been insightful - I'm realizing that this development environment should have been there from the beginning, as a fundamental part of the language's design and user experience.
All syntactic constructs, keywords, patterns, defined variables, functions, etc., can be made available to the user, with auto-complete, suggest, lists of choices. Rather than the user having to remember commands and type them in text, the environment can let them select, compose, and build. Ideally, it can ensure that a program never has a syntax error (conversely, that it makes it impossible to write/build such a program).
Another aspect I've come to appreciate is instant feedback. Any kind of live preview, or automatic build/test, makes a big improvement in the flow of…
Zapier (YC) - Mountain View, CA - full-time, remote possible - developers & designers
We want to bring the power of APIs to the masses and make all web apps talk to each other.
We're primarily Python & Coffeescript touching a bit of everything from Redis and ElasticSearch to Node.js and RabbitMQ. As far as we're concerned the stack is always in flux, we subscribe to no dogmas.
A full stack engineer would fit right in, and prior experience isn't a big deal: good hackers love learning new stuff (as do we, so we hope you can teach us awesome new things).
A designer with a UX background would also have major impact. Trying to represent the insane complexity around mapping disparate APIs is hard, but even more challenging is giving non-technical users the tools to do it.
We'd love to talk about the problems we're having, you can visit http://zapier.com/ and chat us up.
Founder here,
I built this app to summarize any News/Blog articles or Youtube videos into a few lines of text. It saves me time and attention from having to go through an entire article or video, instead, I can read the summary and decide if an article is worth my time to read further.
The app can be accessed as the website or via Zapier integration for those who are interested in automating their process. I have put in free and paid subscription plans as AI resources are not cheap to operate :(.
I integrated it with Zapier so that summaries can be automatically generated for content originating in from RSS feeds, Emails, Bookmarking software like Pocket, Youtube channels, etc
Looking for feedback!
Zapier users can click here for the beta invite of the integration https://zapier.com/developer/public-invite/64050/536dc46f72656a0b0e54c881ed5d51d5/
What kind of app are you looking to build?
If it is a general purpose application, I'd look at learning rails (this book was great for me: https://www.railstutorial.org/book ) and host on heroku.
If it is an API driven application, I'd look at using a tool like Zapier: https://zapier.com/ or Transposit: https://www.transposit.com/ (full disclosure, I work at Transposit).
There may be some low code/no code solutions for mobile apps, but I'm not in that space so not familiar with them.
Frankly, depending on your app, you could do a lot with google forms/typeform and some manual behind the scenes work: http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html
Again, it all depends on what kind of application you are trying to build.