Fun in the Sheets

This is a note about the links in my navigation: Resume & Fibrary. Years ago, someone told me about this interesting tool called glideapp. It’s a way to create a no-code app. Seeing as how my attempt to learn Haskell is currently on indefinite hiatus, this seemed like an ideal tool to try. It lets me fill a Google sheet with tabs, columns, and rows of information that becomes an interactive app.

My first attempt is the Fibrary which is my fiber library. As a knitter and crocheter, I have a large collection of projects in PDF format. But it’s hard to reference my projects by type of yarn, materials needed, project, or designer. So I created my own database to view my options in order to decide what would be next to work on. In the future, I may expand this furthur to incorporate stitch types, chart information, sizes, etc.

My latest app is my interactive Resume. Taking all the elements of a traditional resume, I have laid out sections of my resume and let you drill down on the sections find out more of each piece. It was a fun exercise to understand how I could configure the app based upon the current toolset which has changed from my first times working with the app.

As I flip between the Fibrary and Resume, I can reference the previous tools that have been removed in the newer iterations. Between the two, the first iteration gave the user much more freedom to customize the app’s appearance. The newer interface includes a native “Sheets” dupe which means you don’t need to have a GDrive file or an Excel file. However, I had issues using the internal DB because there were occassional issues with either not allowing me to update a cell or failing to save an edited cell. On some levels it was nice to have the relationships more easily connected. On the other hand, using the Sheets felt more comfortable to create relationships because I could define the connection between content and the different tabs.

I had a lot of fun creating both of these apps. It requires a different type of logic to creating the structure that I wanted to effect. It was probably not the most efficient logic, but it’s an interesting exercise to make yourself think in different ways, like an alternate spacial logic (possibly appeals to me in the same way that Greater Thank Killer Sudoku does). I’m curious to know how other no-code users feel about it because it does require a lateral way of thinking for someone that doesn’t have a math or programming background, while for someone that has that background, this is an exrecise in vertical thinking.