I wanted to make a site that showcased a few things: - The going rate for different professions in the tech field in one place - How those rates were broken down between yearly wages vs. hourly wages - How national rates compared to bay area rates

But getting a backend up and running is usually a huge pain. I wanted to use this opportunity to figure out a simpler way to try and process data and send it in JSON to the front end. I ended up using Google Sheets. There's quite a bit you can do using sheets to grab data from the web, but my bigger concern was translating that over to a site.

After quite a bit of searching and dead ends I found this blog post about publishing sheets to the web so they live update: https://coderwall.com/p/duapqq/use-a-google-spreadsheet-as-y...

It wasn't exactly correct but after fiddling with it I was able to create a live backend that could update itself or with my manipulation and would output in simple JSON format. This is the actual backend call here: https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/list/1uFTr2qPpITgoJJrs...

This obviously isn't the most secure solution but I think it will work well for many designers who want to spin up a backend quickly. Parsing the JSON is pretty simple as well: for(var key in data.feed.entry) { console.log(data.feed.entry[key]['gsx$title']['$t']); };

Happy to answer any questions. I thought this might be useful to some of you. Here's the site I made as well: http://getgoingrate.com/