I’m sure many in the Google Workspace developer community will know the name Bruce Mcpherson and his website https://ramblings.mcpher.com/. There are very few people who can say they have written the book on Google Apps Script and Bruce is one of them with his O’Reilly publication ‘Going GAS’.

At Pulse we recently discovered that Bruce was getting close to his 1,000th post. This milestone has now been reached with Bruce’s latest contribution ‘Creating a connector for Data Studio‘. To help mark this achievement we got in touch with some of the many ‘Bruce fans’ to reflect on Bruce’s work to date and the impact it has had on their own work.

If you would like to add your own comment feel free to use the comments section.

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Laura Taylor – Google Workspace GDE

Bruce Mcpherson is one of the most prolific technical writers I’ve ever encountered.  His intricate systems knowledge along with his unique writing style make for very fascinating and helpful reading.  Not only is Bruce a prolific writer but also a prolific developer, contributing a number of open source libraries many of which are used daily in the Apps Script ecosystem.  A great debt of gratitude is owed Bruce as he has shared his knowledge with so many.  Thank you, Bruce, for your service to the Apps Script community.

Ben Collins – Google Workspace GDE

When I moved from the Microsoft world to the Google world, around 2014, there was one site I kept landing on… and that was Bruce’s! I remember early in my Google Workspace and Apps Script journey, when I was in over my head with a client project, I emailed Bruce to ask if I could use one of his many libraries in the project. He quickly replied “of course!” and proceeded to help me with a few questions I had too. I had the great pleasure of meeting Bruce in person at Next 2019 and he’s a wonderful character with many great stories. We’re lucky to have Bruce as our talisman in the Google Workspace developer group. Cheers to the next 1,000!

Eric Koleda – Former Google Developer Relations

Bruce has been a pillar of the Apps Script community for years, and hitting 1000 posts is but one sign of his love and dedication to the productivity space. My favorite post of Bruce’s ( although it’s so much more than a post) is about cGoa, an OAuth2 library for Apps Script. When the Apps Script engineering team released the /usercallback endpoint they imagined many developers building their own OAuth2 code, but I think Bruce may have been the only person not employed by Google to wade into the murky waters of implementing an authorization library. Throughout this project and others Bruce has always focussed on usability and making sure that users could get to working code quickly. Congratulations Bruce!

Chanel Greco – Google Workspace GDE

I really appreciate how Bruce actively shares his Apps Script knowledge with others through his blog, his books or by answering questions on the different community platforms. 

When searching for something Apps Script related, sooner or later, you’ll land on one of Bruce’s many resources. Many of us have developed our own Apps Script skills thanks to his contributions.

Thank you Bruce!

Charles Maxson – Google Developer Relations

Congratulations on 1,000 posts Bruce! (and THANK YOU from everyone who’s ever tried to use Apps Script – your work has no doubt been discovered and essential for all!)

I myself ‘met’ Bruce through his book “Going GAS: From VBA to Google Apps Script” where he became my personal interpreter in translating my years of Office VBA knowledge into Google Apps Script. As one of the original pioneers who started building solutions on Google Apps G Suite Workspace, what’s amazing is how Bruce has continued to give back to the community by sharing posts, libraries, videos, insights and expertise for such a long time. Having the privilege to work with Bruce now as a Google Developer Expert, he continues to amaze me how much knowledge he’s amassed and still humbly shares as regularly as ever.

Looking forward to you rambling on for another 1,000 Bruce!!!

Anu Srivastava – Google Developer Relations

Thank you so much for all your content! Especially for helping out the Apps Script community!

Clark Lind – Google Apps Suite Workspace GDE Hack

Thank you Bruce for all you have done for the GAS community. You have had worldwide impact and influence and continue to do so. I hope you continue influencing the next generation of scripters coming along. I’ve copied  learned so much from you over the years, it has helped me in my own work and career. You have shown me just how much there is to learn, and how much I don’t know. ;)

Thank you!

Adam Morris — Google Developer Expert & Integrations Director @ Faria Education Group

I like writing libraries, but what I like even more is not having to write them. It’s a grand world indeed that we live in our current universe where we can run into problems and challenges in code, and embark on a journey that leads us to individuals such as yourself, who by their very prolific endeavours establish an even grander world. Thank you.

Andrew Roberts – Freelance Dev and Google Wordspace GDE

One of the true stalwarts of the Apps Script community, Bruce has been an inspiration and endless source of knowledge for the many years I have been involved in Apps Script. Back in my early days of having to Google for how to do most things, Bruce’s site was inevitably the site I’d end up at. The guy literally wrote the book! Almost getting to 1000s posts is an amazing achievement.

Bruce publishing a list of his libraries inspired me to trawl the web and compile an automatically updating list of other Apps Script libraries I could find. Although Bruce’s still make up the vast majority of those available.

The post that particularly stands out for me, and I had lots of fun deploying, was on parallel processing with Apps Script to get around the execution limit. It even displays a funky little graph you can watch.

Thanks again Bruce for your continued support and contributions. 

Riël Notermans – Google Developer Expert and company owner of Zzapps, a Workspace reseller

There are some people that I always look forward to seeing and to spend time with. Bruce is well in that list ;) Actually it has been for too long. 

Hanging out in real life or virtually discussing some features that work great or not, or listening to what Bruce has to say about, well, anything, it is a great experience. Professionally I would not know where to begin the ‘thank you’s’, but one of the most recent is with Bruce ‘mentoring’ me on a Kubernetes project. I got a kickstart in understanding the concepts, together with Bruce pieces of great code and his well-known ramblings really got me going. Congrats Bruce and looking forward to meet again!

Amit Agarwal – Founder @ Digital Inspiration and Workspace GDE

Thank you Bruce for your amazing contributions to the Google community. You cannot imagine how much impact your work has had on the lives of so many developers worldwide. Personally, I have admired your coding style and learnt so much by looking at your work. Thank you again!

Martin Hawksey – University of Edinburgh and Google Workspace GDE 

It’s hard to say exactly when I started following Bruce’s work, but one of the first posts I reshared was Managing Libraries with Google Apps Script from June 2012. Managing libraries is a very fitting way to celebrate Bruce’s contribution to the Google Apps Script community. Using his own Github/AppsScript visualisation tool you can explore the 100+ Google Apps Script repos, including libraries, Bruce has shared. 

One library that I’ve used a lot in my own work is cGoa, which lets you do OAuth2 for Apps Script in a few lines of code. There are a couple of other OAuth2 libraries, but as someone also writing about Google Apps Script solutions, the cGoa setup is straightforward and easy for others to follow. From one post from Bruce it has featured in six of my own, an example of the value of Bruce’s ‘ramblings’ to the community. 

Thank you Bruce!