Using low-code tools to solve problems

No code tools are taking off recently. While this opens a lot of possibilities for a lot of non-developers who can get their business idea of the ground without needing any (read a lot of) technical know-how; it offers devs an opportunity to get their ideas off the ground too without getting into coding solutions right-away.

Google AppSheet is one tool which is free for personal/prototyping use. I used this to create a todo list that can sync to your Google Calendar.

The problem I was trying to solve:

Be able to create calendar events using free form text from desktop/mobile kind of like a chat assistant

Here is how it in action (on mobile):

The desktop version is auto-synced (as it uses the same backing store).

Tools I used:

1. Google Sheet as a backing database to Google App Sheet
2. Zapier integration b/w Google Sheets — Google Calendar

Steps I followed:

1. Create a Google sheet with columns you would like in your todo app.
2. Enable AppScript from “extensions”. It automatically creates an app with associated columns. You can tweak the column data types and other things from Data tab.
3. Deploy the app. It creates a default UI for the CRUD operations required. This can tweaked from the UX tab
4. Go to Zapier and create an account
5. Setup an integration b/w Google Sheet and Google Calendar
6. Configure it to trigger on “updates or addition to rows in the spreadsheet”
7. Enable the Zap
8. Voila! Your created entry from the app would create an entry in Google Calendar

I have also used Google Sheets & App Script to create a low-cost ATS for managing hiring pipeline which I will mention in another article.