i made a google drive shell that could create documents and update the doc's content with PyDrive.
Whats the difference?
Google Docs gets an API for task automation
81–90 of 199 posts
Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation
#82Do Google Doc features really impact the community enough warrant a post? Just seems like marketing to me.
The cool thing about HN is that, by its very nature, any post that gets voted to the front page is warranted.
Given that the mods can alter the rank of a post artificially, and do so probably often, this statement holds no weight.
Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
One class, or volcano, of bugs is sacredly kept only for the poor souls whos ancestors believed writing from right to left was the greatest idea ever (possibly after Monotheism). Try to write in multiple columns format in an RTL lang, then come back speaking of bugs. Then try a mixed RTL/LTR in a bulletin list. One would have thought bidi would be a solved issue in 2019, yet it consistently breaks every text editor e…
That one should be #1 on that list of 'assumptions programmers make', with #2 being that a byte is 8 bits.
Those don't seem equivalent. One affects a billion or so people. The other will only cause trouble in rare cases, no?
Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They don't need to get permission to bring in a new logo - it's part of Office, they can just do it. And no one has to get dragged into it kicking and screaming - you want to work off of an Excel file? Fine! It's still there! Plus it wont be randomly cancelled when Google decides they got bored with it after several years of neglecting it first.
>they got bored with it I've always wondered why Google is so bad at keeping various services going. Your comment caused me to reflect that Google hires a lot of smart people. Smart people tend to get bored with working on the same thing and want to work on new shiny things. Could it be that the smart people at Google do a bang up job of creating new services, but then get bored and move on to something new, leaving…
The incentive system at Google for promotion (which is where the dollars get much bigger) rewards launches, not maintenance work. You'll see hundreds of people on new products that are launching and hardly any full time engineers, excluding SREs, on products that literally bring in a billion dollars because they just work.
Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation
#85They will have a lot of catchup to do to get where Office is now. I'm frankly amazed by how good Microsoft Flow has been. So many dumb business processes rely on an Excel doc somewhere, or a stupid manual email somewhere else. But with Flow I've seen just a single smarty-pants able to fully streamline an entire department one rule at a time. They don't need to get permission to bring in a new logo - it's part of Offi…
Wow. Flow actually would save my company so much time and money and yet it's blocked from my work address.
Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation
#86Great. Can we automate changing every single goddamn spreadsheet to not be in US date format? And while we're in there, how about adding a locale for New Zealand?
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Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
The cool thing about HN is that, by its very nature, any post that gets voted to the front page is warranted.
Given that the mods can alter the rank of a post artificially, and do so probably often, this statement holds no weight.
It holds more weight than your baseless accusations, but please refrain from posting inflammatory comments that do nothing to further the conversation.
Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They don't need to get permission to bring in a new logo - it's part of Office, they can just do it. And no one has to get dragged into it kicking and screaming - you want to work off of an Excel file? Fine! It's still there! Plus it wont be randomly cancelled when Google decides they got bored with it after several years of neglecting it first.
>they got bored with it I've always wondered why Google is so bad at keeping various services going. Your comment caused me to reflect that Google hires a lot of smart people. Smart people tend to get bored with working on the same thing and want to work on new shiny things. Could it be that the smart people at Google do a bang up job of creating new services, but then get bored and move on to something new, leaving…
It's because ads, google cloud, and a few other business units represent almost 100% of the revenue of Google (and parent company Alphabet).
In a deeply fundamental way, every service or software product that isn't part of the revenue stream doesn't really matter to the business and there is no incentive to maintain it.
Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They don't need to get permission to bring in a new logo - it's part of Office, they can just do it. And no one has to get dragged into it kicking and screaming - you want to work off of an Excel file? Fine! It's still there! Plus it wont be randomly cancelled when Google decides they got bored with it after several years of neglecting it first.
>they got bored with it I've always wondered why Google is so bad at keeping various services going. Your comment caused me to reflect that Google hires a lot of smart people. Smart people tend to get bored with working on the same thing and want to work on new shiny things. Could it be that the smart people at Google do a bang up job of creating new services, but then get bored and move on to something new, leaving…
Google's promotion process biases very heavily towards "impact".
The problem is that maintaining existing projects generally isn't considered to be a demonstration of impact (or at least, it's a MUCH harder case to make). It's much easier to make the case that greenfield projects demonstrate impact.
Additionally, engineers have a good amount of power over what they get to work on: managers generally have to convince them to join a team. It's nice in concept, but lacks a steady influx of unwitting new engineers to help support all the not-so-sexy projects (like many other companies).
…so, you tend to see a pattern of engineers building a new thing, launching it, and then moving on to the next project. Leaving a trail of poorly supported projects in their wake.
Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation
#90One cool thing I did with the Google Drive API was pull in our app's release notes from Google Drive. This allows our product and support teams to write/edit release notes and have it "magically" appear in-app as HTML. The workflow is: 1.) Employee creates a GDoc in a known, shared folder 2.) Application pulls all GDocs from this shared folder 3.) Application uses GDrive API to convert the GDoc to HTML 4.) HTML is di…
Do you have to worry about abuse of the API key used to pull in the doc or this isn't an issue (e.g. API call cost or going over a quota)?