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Learn Data Engineering with Google Sheets
Four years ago, I had no idea what data engineering was. I wasn’t familiar with data stacks, APIs, ETL/ELT, warehouses, or SQL. I was a freelance web developer using HTML/CSS/JavaScript, WordPress, and Webflow. But when a client asked me to automate some reporting processes, I unknowingly took the first steps on my data engineering journey. […]
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Cards as Nested Resources in the Trello API
If you’re here for Trello API basics… I’m going to skip over a lot of the introductory stuff about the Trello API – if you want to read more about the basics, you’ll want to read their Trello API Introduction. What am I working on? I’m digging into a project where I want to pull […]
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Web Scraping with Tampermonkey
I ran into a scenario today where a client needed data scraped from a website, but the website offers no API, cURL, or fetch capabilities as far as I can tell. The data can be presented in a datatable, but this would require some scripting to run through multiple pages of results, each row being […]
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Using Excel to List and Count Files
On one of my recent web scraping projects, I got a follow-up request from a client to add some additional data to my results. The scraped data was dumped into individual folders in PDF format, often with multiple documents per folder. The client wanted to know if I could provide them with a count of […]
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Building and POSTing a JSON Payload with JavaScript
I’ve been automating some QuickBooks data entry for a client, and in doing so I needed to figure out how to build and POST a JSON payload with vanilla JavaScript. Seems like the kind of thing other people might be interested in – I’m not going to share my full code base because I’m still […]
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Turning Trello into a Fully Functional Ticket System
If you haven’t heard of Trello by now…have you been living under a rock? Seriously, though – Trello is a powerful and user-friendly board-style app. People use it for all sorts of things, but for me it has always been a handy organization system for my work. Trello boards consist of lists and cards; cards […]
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Sending Values from an HTML Form to a JavaScript File
I was doing some UX/UI tweaking on a Google Sheet today and did some experimentation with custom menus vs. custom sidebars. Menus are nice when you just need to execute script files. But when you need to pass values into a script, your options are: A) making the user enter data into cells, or B) […]
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Switching Between Companies with the QuickBooks API
I’ve got a client whose accounting team manages several companies in QuickBooks. We’ve automated some processes for them using the ultra-useful QuickBooks Accounting API and the powerful flexibility of Google Sheets, but up until now I’ve been setting up API connections on a per-company basis, which is kind of a pain to manage and would […]
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Sheets to Docs Mail Merge
TL;DR: I needed a way to perform a mail merge, passing data from a Google Sheet over to a Doc. Nearly everything works, with the exception of two complicating factors – the template file I’m copying includes a table, and one of the table cells must contain an image. I’m stumped! If you’re anything like […]
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You Get What You Pay For
I learned an important lesson this week. In my role as a professional web designer, I do my best to respect my clients’ budgets. I know that not everyone has $40,000 laying around for a website. Sometimes – especially when using an open-source system like WordPress – you’ll find there are multiple ways to get […]
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Today Doug Learned 