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Comment by nirga | Hacker News Reader

At first I thought that a code alternative for a no-code solution like zapier was counterintuitive. But as an engineer using Zapier (for the first time) these past few months I got so frustrated by the lack of an option to just write some "if" or just 2 lines of code to make things work the way I want them.

I think trigger.dev nails it. This is exactly what I needed.

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Trigger.dev looks like it would be amazing if you want a simplified temporal that is still 100% code based and exclusively in Typescript. If you are looking for a Zapier-for-developer experience, we took an alternative route at Windmill of allowing Python/Javascript/Go/Bash as steps but the workflows are still GUI based: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill/blob/main/imgs/win...

Despite them being GUI based, you can do everything that temporal enable, approval steps/suspending workflows until being reactivated by a webhook, branching, etc, etc... It's 100% open-source and self-hostable.

Interesting. Here's a previous discussion about Windmill:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31272793 (9 months ago)

Be still me heart!

A contributors guide? Documentation? A PUBLIC ROADMAP!

THIS is an example of open source done well.

n8n is also great about this. It retains the visual “easy mode” environment but lets you drop in a JavaScript node whenever you need to do something more complex

I found the JavaScript nodes to be quite annoying. Specifically -

1. I want a proper IDE

2. Proper typing so the feedback cycle is faster.

3. Being able to use external packages

4. Being able to quickly test my custom node across old runs.

Their JavaScript nodes take me an absurd amount of time to get right. And I've needed to use them far more often than I would like.

Wow, I’m never gonna try to build a tool for developers

All of the list and they also want to pay you $0. $20 sounds like a robbery. Meanwhile it costs 20 minutes of a freelance time.. for the whole product.

Zapier has a python / JS code step (basically a AWS lambda) you can use to do something like this. Downside is that it has a timeout of 10s

Huh cool thanks I didn’t know that! I guess it’s just another action and not something “native” to Zapier (so if you want to later connect it to some off-the-shelf action you can’t).

You can connect code steps to other actions. For example, every Python code step has a reserved `output` variable which allows you to pass a list out to the next steps. It gets passed as stringified JSON: if it contains dicts, those values are made available automatically as inputs to other steps. You can also pass more complex, nested JSON and just json.loads it later.

And the second downside is that you don't necessarily get the same data as the normal no-code steps...

It's still a mess to manage arrays and arguments auto-split by commas

I have the same thoughts. I tried node-red and I got frustrated having to do all this drag and drop stuff for something I could code easily.

Also look at https://pipedream.com/

Think that's why they also have built Pipedream.com (not affiliated)

You should try make.com. It is great!

Last time I tried make.com, they couldn’t run scenarios in parallel: every subsequent run had to wait for the prior one to finish.

Was a dealbreaker for me.

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