DRYing Out Your Zapier Paths

If you've built anything complex in Zapier, you've probably used the Paths app to provide conditional logic. If you're working with paths, you've probably found yourself tediously setting up duplicate actions in multiple locations within your workflow, wishing for a way to have two Zapier paths end up at the same action step. Fortunately there's …

Testing Pre-Request Scripts in Postman

I don't have enough time to give the full background that I would want to give, because Luke is having a tantrum downstairs and I think my buddy-free time is about to end. I am using Postman as a real-code alternative to Integromat. I'm using Postman to connect Quickbooks to Airtable and Zoho CRM. Coding …

Using ImportJSON to Put JSON into a Google Spreadsheet

After I brought my QuickBooks customers into Google Sheets to put into Airtable, it was time to do the same for the vendors. I didn't feel like going through all the steps again, so I decided to take another stab at using ImportJSON. Before I used my semi-automatic procedure to convert JSON into a table …

How I Put JSON into a Google Spreadsheet

My goal is to export a list of Customer IDs from QuickBooks and create a QuickBooks ID column on my Accounts table in Airtable. This will let me use an API tool like Integromat to keep my Airtable data in sync with my QuickBooks data without having to do double data-entry. I'll outline my process …

Me-Focused Blogging

The following is a transcript of the conversation I just had with Claudiu. It started out as me thinking out loud to try to unravel my thoughts, but pretty soon Claudiu chimed in with his typical wisdom and clarity.  He was multitasking with a computer game, so the pace of the conversation was slow enough …

Self-Reflection Meta-Explosion

Blogging is hard. It's not so bad when I'm just telling a simple story or throwing a few thoughts on a page, but when I sit down and try to express a complicated idea, I remember that blogging is writing and writing is hard. When I get really stuck, I take a step back and …

Blog Naming

I've decided I don't like the name of my parenting blog, Nothing by Default.  I'm trying to convey a purposeful mindset of never being satisfied to do the default option, but it's too easy to read it in a negative way: defaulting to doing nothing. Plus the name is neither parenting nor Montessori specific, which …

Weblogs

I came across an interesting post as I was reading Rands in Repose.  In it, Rands observes that bloggers build credibility with their readers. The blogs that he follows regularly form a network of authors whose opinions he trusts, even on topics that are new to him. He also ponders the question, “How are people going …

So I Just Finished Reading Joel on Software…

Since he started blogging 18 years ago, Joel Spolsky has written over a thousand posts. His blog is big enough to fill four books and then some! And... I just read the whole thing in two weeks.  (He mostly quit blogging after 2010, so it went pretty quick toward the end, but still!) Fortunately he introduced me …

How to Bind Parameters to SQL Queries Using node-sqlite3

So you're using node-sqlite3 to work with a database. You want to run a SQL query that uses lots of parameters. You could string everything together with + operators but that's a big ugly pain: var sqlStatement = 'INSERT INTO Timesheet (date, category, duration) ' + 'VALUES ("' + newDate + '","' + newCategory +'","' newDuration …