No developer likes to do admin work. They would rather be developing.
With that in mind, I’m going to show you how to avoid repeated clerical changes by making a simple team roster using the Google Sheets API, Node.JS, Express, and React.JS.
But why?
Most developers are pretty great people. Slow to anger, happy to help, everybody’s best friend — that’s us. But if there’s one thing that gets under our skin, it’s having to do redundant work. Chief among these crazy-making requests are updates to content that was meant to remain static.
Because the thing is, we know this info is somewhere else. Doing nothing, sitting in a word doc or spreadsheet somewhere when it should be populating our site with info for us. It’s why we invented CMSs. It may be our job to change it, but it shouldn’t have to be.
However, even if you’re not using a CMS on your project, the chances are pretty good that someone is using Google Drive to keep things in order. The chances are also pretty good that someone, let’s say your project manager, is using Google Sheets to keep track of things as well. A plausible use case would be a team roster with names, roles, emails, etc.
Wouldn’t it be able to simply query that roster, in order to populate a team roster page, rather than having to update it yourself when there’s lineup change? It would free up time for the dev and eliminate the risk of miscommunication between them and the pm, and the possible discrepancy between two sets of information rather than a single source of truth.
My friends, that’s exactly what we’re going to do.
At the end of this article, we’ll have a simple, locally running, web app that displays the members of our team, with information populated from a spreadsheet on Google Sheets.

#javascript #nodejs #react #expressjs #programming