There’s a bike valet service at a hospital in Portland. About 300 people use it every day to get to work. I made the web app and a few other tools using Google Apps Scripts that make it easy for the valet attendants and customers to check their bikes in and out, send automated emails and text messages.
It’s fun to have made something that so many people actually use and that I hope makes the world a little bit better. Plus I’m a completely self-taught programmer (my day job is content strategy) and it was rewarding to work on a bigger project than the little scripts/games/etc. I usually make for myself.
Google Apps Script is great for tools like this: I have used some at work for a while to manage gig listings for a musician... just the tiny bit of automation happening at midnight let's them add shows via a Google form and forget all about them, knowing that geocoding, and removing of old shows, and other funny business, will all happen without them needing to maintain it. BUT if they ever do need to modify a show, they are dealing with a google sheet, which they understand.
Yep that’s pretty much exactly why they wanted it built around a spreadsheet. Before they had an app somebody built and never maintained. It was buggy and the data was more or less inaccessible.
Now with the spreadsheet they not only have access to the data when/if they want it, it’s also super easy to roll back if something goes haywire.
It’s fun to have made something that so many people actually use and that I hope makes the world a little bit better. Plus I’m a completely self-taught programmer (my day job is content strategy) and it was rewarding to work on a bigger project than the little scripts/games/etc. I usually make for myself.