“Road to GDE” is a 3-month mentoring program focused on supporting people from historically underrepresented groups in tech on their path to becoming a Google Developer Expert.
This site is hopefully proof that there is an incredibly rich Google Apps Script / Google Workspace developer community. If you are one of those contributors based in EMEA, LATAM and India from an underrepresented group ‘Road to GDE’ is a great opportunity to help you become recognised as a Google Developer Expert in the field that you are already passionate about. The source link contains more information about requirements and how to start your ‘Road to GDE’
Stack Overflow is a question and answer website for professional and enthusiast programmers. It is the flagship site of the Stack Exchange Network, created in 2008 by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. It features questions and answers on a wide range of topics in computer programming.
Kanshi Tanaike has recently published the 4th annual Stack Overflow trend report for the Google Apps Script question tag. The full report, including how the data is collected, is published here and there is some further discussion on the Google Apps Script Google Group community.
From the headline data it is interesting to see the total number of Google Apps Script questions posted on Stack Overflow has declined following previous years of continued growth. It’s important to remember that this decline is unlikely to directly correlated with general App Script usage. Factors that might be influencing the number of questions asked include like better developer documentation, larger corpus of existing Stack Overflow answers, growing number of other community resources and spaces.
Fig. 1. Year vs. Total questions, answered, solved and closed questions. These all questions include the tag of “google-apps-script” in the tags. Image credit: Kanshi Tanaike
Another consideration is Google Apps Script is increasingly positioned as a platform for citizen developers and low coders. This community may be more hesitant to ask questions on a site that has a reputation as being for ‘professional programmers’. My conclusion is the annual Stack Overflow report for Google Apps Script is always very useful to see, particularly in terms of see if there are enough people answering questions.
Finally, as a little easter egg here is a Google Sheet I’ve created which includes a little Apps Script to fetch my own Stack Overflow annual report data. Copy and open the script editor to add a monthly trigger to get the data. Next year I’m planning to look at changes in post viewcount :)
I’m not really a reddit user but this question about adding custom attachments my Google Workspace Solutions Gallery – Mail Merge example landed in my inbox. The solution is, in Google Apps Script tradition, one line of code! The line is:
Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages. You can run it against any web page, public or requiring authentication. It has audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO and more.
In this story Jasper Duizendstra shows the added value of the changes made in the constructor pattern using the factory functions. It also shows how to implement chaining and a builder pattern in Apps Script.
Most conversations around solutions or automations created using Apps Script eventually get to a point where being able to address concerns around its reliability, security and scalability becomes a challenge — more so if compared to having similar applications being built on other platforms (say: AWS, GCP, Firebase etc.).
In this post, we’ll see how to navigate our way through said constructs by addressing parts of these problems and also explore ways in which we can bake some solutions right from the get-go!
In this post Sourabh Choraria provides some very useful answers for common questions organisations have when using Google Apps Script as part of their infrastructure. Points covered in this post include: managing concurrent executions; being able to securely store, access & manage API keys, tokens; and considerations around quotas.
Google Cloud has acquired AppSheet. Do I care? At first I thought, “Not really, it’s just interesting news.”
I guess that I do care in the sense that I want to be valued as a programmer, and no-code development feels like programmers are being thrown away in favor of something else. The driving force behind this is development costs. Even if an independent programmer only charged $5 dollars an hour, in two hours the customer would have paid $10 dollars, which is twice as much money as the $5 a month AppSheet plan.
It was recently announced that Google has acquired AppSheet a low-code platform for business users that lets you build applications that can integrate into a variety of sources including Google Sheets. This has resulted in an interesting thread on the Google Apps Script Community Google Group linked to from the source link at the end of this post, in particular, impact on Apps Script developers. On the one hand you can argue that products like AppSheet, with there low/no code environments remove the need for developers. However, the general consensus on the thread is rather than removing developer opportunities it may in fact create them with opportunities to extend the basic functionality of AppSheets. This comment from Alan Wells in particular caught my eye:
What AppsSheet does, is increase the number of apps and code being created, as opposed to lots of business creating no apps at all. It’s kind of like, you need a lot more mechanics if everyone can afford a car. If only the rich can afford a car, then there aren’t going to be many car mechanic jobs. So, I think that AppSheet is filling a need, which increases the number of apps. Some of those apps will crash, and they’ll need the equivalent of an auto body technician to repair the damage. This is part of the evolution of the computing industry.
You can join in on this discuss using the following link:
A brief history of apps script capabilities – There’s been much coming and going over the past 10 years. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of some of the winners, and losers.
At this year’s Google Cloud Next I co-presented a session entitled “How to grow a spreadsheet into an application,” where the thesis was that it’s OK to start with a spreadsheet and layer on additional technologies as you gain adoption and your requirements change. However that doesn’t mean that Sheets is always a great choice for storing your application’s data, and in this post I’ll explore some of the signals that you should be looking into other database options. Sheets are for people!
