Hello world

This is my first post on my shiny new blog to confirm that everything is working correctly.

Several years ago, I interned at a company where their manufacturing supply chain was optimized using Spreadsheets (Excel) and code (VBA). The creators of this "software" were not software engineers. They were supply chain analysts that deeply understood the problem domain and they'd picked Excel as the programming platform because they were already familiar with it. Up until then, I had only used spreadsheets for simple use cases such as storing tabular data or performing simple calculations. That internship taught me just how powerful a spreadsheet could be.

More recently, I've become a huge fan of Google's spreadsheet software, Google Sheets. I originally began using it when I had to collaborate on a spreadsheet with co-workers at a startup. I got tired of keeping track of which Excel workbook had the latest edits. Is Report_v3_latest.xls the version I should use or is it Report_v3_final.xls? If you've ever had to collaborate on Excel workbooks via email, you know exactly what I'm talking about!

Google has been slowly and steadily improving Sheets to a point where I rarely use Excel. Thousands of schools, colleges and companies have begun using Google Sheets through G Suite (which is the business version of Google's productivity suite of products).

G Suite also has an in-built coding platform called Apps Script that makes it easy to build useful applications on top of apps like Sheets, Forms and Slides. I've built several apps to automate repetitive tasks and it's actually pretty easy to do once you get the hang of it. A number of folks have asked me to teach them how to code so they can build their own apps. So, I started this blog to share my knowledge with you all (and also learn from you).

Thanks for reading.