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I built an automation to track my weight

I built an automation to track my weight

Part 1

Joshua Voydik
August 29, 2023

WIP…..

I’m working on a little automation to help me track my weight.

I’m still in the process of debugging this but I made an automation app using AI tools. I really wanted an automation that sends me an email asking me, “how much do you weigh today?” then then automatically send my response to a Google Sheet for tracking.

Don’t worry, the below data is test data 🙂

Technical effort: Medium

Read time: 2 minutes

Why this exercise was helpful

Helped me quickly learn:

SendGrid APIs
Google Sheets APIs
How to quickly set up the DNS settings to make this work

A benefit is that I don’t need to rely on a Zapier for this automation. Plus, I am not sure how well Zapier could manage an application like this…

Model

GPT-4 because it’s still the crown champ for code

What my automation does

Sends me an email
Asks me “How much do you weight today?”
I respond with my weight
- The response parses the text and extracts only the weight
The response gets piped to a Google Sheet
- It appends to the previous column that has data

Initial prompt

Help me create a weight tracker spreadsheet. What I want to happen is an email gets triggered to me. From there my answer to the email will fill in a cell on a Google sheet corresponding to the date. I have the intention of making this public and even charging for it. So there should be some UI associated with it and we can figure that out later.

What I learned

Unfortunately I’m not done with the app but I’m testing it with Insomnia… send a POST to the /email endpoint within my application to get that sweet 200. Once I do that, that payload gets sent to my application.

You can create your own automations. Perhaps you could even create your own UIs around those automations too. As I mentioned I’m on part 1, so the followup will have this automation working end-to-end and ideally in a form where you can sign up for it. (So I’ll need to build out the UIs and more.)