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