
Show HN: Serverless Scripting for GitHub, Asana, Airtable, and more - hackerews
https://scripts.blockspring.com/?Serverless=start
======
orliesaurus
Started playing with it, need to find a good use case. Maybe something like:

\- when a trello card is due send me a message on Facebook to tell me to stop
watching memes.

\- when someone opens an issue on GitHub with a specific keyword send me a
slack notification.

\- when i get an email from someone (like a client) requesting a quote, open a
new card in Trello in the prospective clients board

Any chance to get LinkedIn support?

~~~
hackerews
Here's one I really like:

[https://community.blockspring.com/t/starlet-collector-
create...](https://community.blockspring.com/t/starlet-collector-creates-the-
stars-information-in-your-readme-on-github/23)

Click to update all the repo star counts in a README.md, and push a new
commit.

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tyingq
Trying to understand the concept here. It feels sort of like ifttt or zapier.
But different, because the "UI" for creating integrations is spread out on to
the 3rd party sites (Github, Airtable, etc)...by injecting the UI with a
chrome plugin. As opposed to a central administrative UI.

Is that roughly correct?

Edit: Ahh, not just background integration, but also a greasemonkey like
ability to tweak the 3rd party sites as well, right?

~~~
hackerews
This is for building add-ons for GitHub, Asana, Trello, Airtable, Pivotal
Tracker, and other productivity apps. And they don't break because they
cleanly use that app's API.

The primary features are meant to make API development much better:

\- Sign in with X instead of setting up OAuth flows or auth.

\- Webhooks are built in, so you don't need a server to catch.

\- API docs autocomplete. No need to dig through them.

\- It's Serverless. Deploy your add-on on save.

It's inspired by Google Apps Script, the platform that powers all Google Docs
add-ons. Hence less like Greasemonkey in that it uses real APIs under the
hood, and less like Zapier in that it's for building add-ons instead of event
pipelines.

~~~
tyingq
>less like Zapier in that it's for building add-ons instead of event pipelines

Hmm. I'd gotten that impression because of these excerpts from your site:

 _" When someone stars your GitHub repo, automatically send them a thank you
email"_

 _" Blockspring Scripts makes it easy to sync data, build alerts, reports,
integrations, and 'if x then y' workflows for the products you use every day"_

~~~
hackerews
Thanks, good point. It's more for use-cases like this:

\- Build a Mail Merge add-on for Airtable in 2 Minutes:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahG935eGnb4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahG935eGnb4)

\- Build a Sheets Importer/Exporter for Trello in 60 Seconds:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqcD6Qrc3Ck](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqcD6Qrc3Ck)

UPDATE: changed a bit of content on page to reflect this.

------
hnrodey
What are the security risks of using a tool like this? How do I know that
you're not secretly siphoning off the data from these apps?

~~~
andrei_says_
I’d like to know this as well. Thank you.

~~~
hackerews
Good question. You'll need to trust the company behind this, and make sure the
scopes they're requesting are reasonable. Similar to any other app you use
that asks you to "sign in with x". Luckily here, the company behind this
([https://www.blockspring.com](https://www.blockspring.com)) is used by
thousands of businesses, so a safe bet.

~~~
andrei_says_
Sign in with x usually allows access to my name and email address.

Trusting my content is another matter.

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holtalanm
Am I the only one more excited about the built-in slack integration in the
browser on that page?
[https://www.joindowntown.com](https://www.joindowntown.com) seems really
cool.

~~~
hackerews
Annoyingly Slack didn't let this get published in their app store. Too similar
in functionality to Slack itself.

------
gingerlime
Any pricing info? couldn't find it on the scripts side, and neither on the
main site...

~~~
hackerews
It's free for developers. Has a limit on compute time, but most usecases won't
run into it.

