I’m always curious how people use IFTTT, Zapier or aletrnatives (e.g. Shortcuts on iOS).
I’m a developer and I like to automate a lot of the stuff I do, either with bash commands/script or nodejs/python for more complex stuff, and user scripts in the browser.
I can’t find a good use-case for IFTTT and I feel like I’m missing out on a big part here. I’m not sure if I’m not thinking about it right, or if it just doesn’t apply to my workflow.
You've probably already optimized most of your painful workflows, but as a developer, you could probably be saving a ton of dev time using your own Zapier integrations.
I use the following workflow all the time for slackbots and prototyping a new feature:
Step 1
Zapier Webhook - Triggers on POST request to hooks.zapier.com/abc123 (Zapier provides this URL for each "Zap" while you are setting it up)
Step 2
Zapier Code Step - (python or javascript) basically a lambda function - parse your incoming POST request and do whatever with it
Step 3
Some sort of Output - send email/slack/sms
Realworld example - I submitted an iOS app that got rejected because of their community management policy - basically I needed to add a way for users to report abusive content. It took me 15 minutes to add this using the above Zap. I probably could have added it to our API in a similar amount of time, but forwarding each report to slack and aggregating them in airtable would have added to this - not to mention building out a web frontend somewhere to see/review them.
We also have a bunch of slackbots to pull stats and run jobs. Zapier enables us to do a lot of "chatops" with less code and more flexibility.
edit - I used to work at Zapier - loved the product before I worked there and still do
