Recently, I started to use, or actually – misuse, a service called “If This, Then That” which is written and called mostly IFTTT. Modern tools and applications solve one problem very good, and I like it. The drawback from it is that connectivity is the worst problem we’re facing right now. IFTTT came to the rescue by providing an interface to connect all these services, and I’d like to use it well. However, I have no good use for applets right now. Most of what I tried, actually, annoyed me:
- When I like something on Twitter, it creates a new task in a Todoist project called “Liked Tweets”. Because most of the time I’d like to see it later.
- When I take a screenshot on my iPhone, it sends it to a Telegram group called “Screenshots”. I thought it’d be cool, but it is super annoying.
- When I create a task on Todoist, send it to a Telegram group called “Tasks”.
Bah. That sucks. I really want to use IFTTT, but I need to find a good use. I don’t hold a software engineer role for the next couple of months because I volunteered to command in the tech officer training course. However, lately, I started to think about things I could do with IFTTT when I return to software engineering:
- Dev Screenshot => Slack: Whenever I take a screenshot on a test/development phone, send it to a “Screenshots” Slack channel. or a Telegram group. Whatever.
- Dev Screenshot => Todoist: Whenever I take a screenshot on a test/development phone, add it as a task on a todo list app, so I would know I have to add it inside a pull-request.
- Todo Comment => Todoist: Whenever I push a code with a // TODO comment, create a new task in my todo list app.
- Todo Comment => Slack: Whenever I push a code with a Todo comment, send it to a slack channel so people can make fun of me (mention me and ask me to do it already)
- Dedicated Mailbox => Telegram: Create a mailbox for reminders, so todo apps/calendars etc can send me notifications through Telegram. (Even though I have the native todo apps and calendars for Mac and iOS.. so it will probably just annoy me too)
- Telegram => Facebook Group: Whenever I add some kind of hashtag (let’s say, #fullstack_group), share the message with a dedicated Facebook group.
- Calendar + Photos => Some photo management: Whenever I take a photo, check on my calendar if I need to be somewhere. If I do need to be there, add the photo to the calendar meeting or something. I don’t use any photo management tools but it sounds cool.
- GitHub/GitLab/BitBucket/Whatever => Todoist: whenever I’m mentioned at GitHub/GitLab, add a todo with the link. Two-way bind GitLab’s Todo’s to the todo list app can work as well.
Let's share applets!
Software developers, artists, musicians, and just everybody: what cool IFTTT applets do you have and use regularly? I’d like to experiment with cool stuff!
Top comments (4)
I was actually thinking about this the other day... If GitHub supported enough IFTTT for commits and PRs, could you string together a CI pipeline?
Edit: ifttt.com/github What the actual $#@%. There's only ONE action available, "Create an issue"? And no triggers for commit status.
Edit 2: There's no IFTTT for Travis-CI. :-/ Is there a better alternative to IFTTT for devs?
I think you really should have a look at Huginn, to me it's a IFTTT on steroids and more appealing as it's self hosted (and I let it process pretty private data)
What I'm currently doing with it:
We just need a way to trigger a web hook to IFTTT, and run it in now.sh or something 😄
GitHub web hooks -> custom app in now.sh -> IFTTT through webhook
This is actually possible. Use the maker channel to make a POST request to your web server and launch your sh script from there.