Thread by @geoffreylitt

1/ Thread about the power of no-code "macros"...

Using @airtable to help cities organize volunteer grocery deliveries. A city asked for help batching delivery routes.

Built v1 of the feature in an hour (!), using a JS "Scripting Block" macro + @graphhopper geo API

2/ No-code + Turing-complete escape hatch is an old idea, and maybe not the most elegant, but can be so effective:

* Airtable provides great UX out of the box
* Ceiling on functionality can be pretty high if (big if) you can write macros

3/ Another example: a city was manually updating several related fields when assigning a volunteer to a delivery, and wanted to update all with one click.

Turned around the feature in 15 mins:

4/ This is the code for that second example.

Technically "JS programming," but feels more like coding 101 than the ball of cruft that is modern JS.

Could actually imagine people picking this up casually!

5/ The editor is well done too, my favorite detail is that it has autocomplete / typechecking specific to your database schema 😀

And of course examples + docs built in, no terminal nonsense, etc

6/ Airtable already had an API but this is totally different because it runs in the existing UI. No setting up your own web frontend, authenticating users, so much complexity gone

7/ None of this is perfect of course: lots of constraints, easy to get trapped, vendor lock-in, macro programming could still be made easier, etc..

But feels like a really nice platform for when you need to launch fast and push the feature ceiling as high as possible

8/ Btw this is the project page, collaborating with an awesome team led by @jessunscripted @GoLeftMitali. Get in touch if you want to bring this to your community:

neighborexpress.org

9/ Ah, this blog post perfectly articulates what's nice about this scripting model! Feels like building a CLI app, but with richer I/O primitives. Awesome use case for async/await

airtable.news/creating-a-scr…