Day 716: ramblings

I spent today continuing to work on the spreadsheet handling changes. And by work, I mean struggle.

What I’m trying to do can be described by this question: How can I make Browserflow more resilient to spreadsheet changes?

Currently, Browserflow identifies columns by their order. Say you have a spreadsheet with the column called “Name”. If you rename that column to “Company Name”, the flow will continue to work without issues.

However, if you insert another column before that one, then the flow will break because Browserflow will assume that the new column is the one for “Name”.

So for the past 4 days or so, I’ve been trying to come up with a way to make Browserflow more resilient to change in columns so that adding or removing a column won’t break flows. It’s a hard problem because if I rely on the column name, then renaming a column will break the flow; if I rely on the column order, then adding/removing a column will break the flow. It’s not great.

And then I had a realization earlier today: This is a waste of time. Zapier and Integromat both also suffer from this issue of identifying columns by their order (thereby not being resilient to column changes), and they’re incredibly successful businesses. (Of course, they do more than just connect to Google Sheets, but it’s a common integration for both of them.) If they’ve gotten this big without solving that problem, why am I bothering with it?

In fact, how often would this even happen? This would only benefit users who have created a spreadsheet, linked it, and then modified the spreadsheet by creating or removing a column. It’s just not that frequent. So why am I spending so much time on this?

I need to start asking myself the question “What is the most important thing I could be working on?” more often because I just got nerd-sniped by a technical problem that simply doesn’t have much impact. As a company of one, I need to prioritize as aggressively as possible because if I don’t do it, then it simply won’t happen.