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Comment by mikeknoop | Hacker News Reader

Zapier co-founder here.

This is seriously the biggest change to our product since launching the company. We've been working on it for a year (including a beta w/ several thousand users) and are very excited to finally release it. Before, Zapier only supported 1-to-1 integrations which limited it's power. Multi-Step Zaps open up a huge array of new power...

- transforming data (like dates, string manipulation)

- executing JS code in between steps (can do manipulation, extra API calls, etc.)

- looking up data inside other apps

- if an item isn't found when looking it up, create it

More details in our release notes: https://zapier.com/blog/workflow-automation/

How we built this: http://blog.invisionapp.com/redesigning-interactive-editor/

I know a ton of folks in the HN community use Zapier. Thank you so much for your support. I can't wait to see what you build now!

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Likewise - Zapier co-founder/CTO here - really excited about this launch. It represents a complete re-build of our stack to support workflows. Pretty much anyone can build complex workflows from a pretty easy to use UI.

To call this out specifically - I think HN might appreciate the Code steps you can add to your workflow - we support both Python [0] and Javascript [1] today.

I've been using it to replace dozens of crontabs and others are using it to inject custom scripting into workflows around Github, Bitbucket, Trello, Salesforce, etc. I especially like making Slack bots with it (we've made a few game moderator bots, pretty fun).

I'll be around all day - happy to answer any questions. There is some cool tech under the hoods.

[0] https://zapier.com/help/code-python/#how-does-it-work

[1] https://zapier.com/help/code/#how-does-it-work

Have you thought about adding time-delays between zaps?

Allow me to work magic for you: https://zapier.com/zapbook/delay/ (it's brand new today, too) :)

And I love you.

Give this man a Cookie!

We love Zapier and I'm really excited to start playing around with this. One concern I've always had as an engineer using Zapier was how it accounted for unique trigger events.

1. Concerning privacy, for API's that don't offer webhooks for instance, does Zapier poll the API and then store some of our data in order to confirm that new records are indeed new? 2. Concerning robustness, what insurance is there against any failure that the zap will catch up with its triggers?

We don't currently use Zapier for anything mission critical and I'm hesitant to recommend it, but it would be pretty cool if we could use it for making zaps that contain more sensitive data and are more critical.

The privacy policy states: "Your user-facing Task History is stored for the life of your account so that you can monitor Zapier activity and replay failures." [1] I was hoping for a bit more of a technical explanation, though, and could only find pricing FAQ's.

[1] https://zapier.com/help/data-privacy/

A quick primer:

1. We store a hashed unique id for polling deduplication for as long as your zap is on. We don't store "all" data for all items "seen" in this case.

2. The nice thing about polling is even if we miss a beat here or there - catching up is crazy easy. This is usually no problem at all.

Reliability is actually a big push for us in 2016 - while we are already pretty good we want to be provably safe for mission critical stuff. Keep an eye for some transparency/service status stuff from us this year.

More details since you linked to data privacy:

The task history stores all the data around a task that fires, we've found it is critical for transparency so users can see what happened when and with what data.

The raw logs (think outbound HTTP API calls) are stored for 7 days max and are absolutely critical for us determining just what an account is doing in the system. We just roll them off after 7 days for security reasons.

Very excited about the Multi-Step Zaps! I've spent the last 20 minutes updating all our Zaps to be more fruitful and have a bit more to continue. The workflow is clean, the experience is great, and value is clear. Thank you!

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