Hi,
I am an IT guy but not a developer (even though I had my fair share of scripting and I can produce "some code" if necessary).<p>Few months ago I had a problem of booking a service that could have weeks/months of wait, and ended up crafting a 10-15 lines script in Powershell that monitored the underlying API used by that service for the specific thing I needed every few min and notify me via ntfy.sh on my phone.<p>When I shared this with colleagues they joked with me suggesting to sell this as a service. I briefly thought about it but discarded the option as I don't believe this would be really remunerative considering this is specific for the country I am living which is quite small (also it will be highly dependent of that specific web application and its API).
Still, I believe it would be a nice thing to try to build a simple app (probably web rather than mobile) and share it with the local users.
A dev would probably take a weekend to do the bulk of it, but I am not a dev :) and unfortunately family and work take enough time.<p>The way I see it would be something like:<p>- users will be able to simply register/login (or at least I need a way to map their choice to their notification "address" and avoid they spam others / allow them to modify/cancel a monitor - could be using some social login or magic links or classic user with mail.. )<p>- they will be able to select what they need to monitor (they type some word / site fetches options based on a list that is built by querying that remote site API and they select), specify few options (checkboxes or similar)<p>- a background process will run and check the availability based on the list of the users requests, see if anything has changed and notified the appropriate users when a slot is freed up (I used ntfy.sh for myself but it's probably not ideal for users to expect them to install the app so maybe I will have to use email or similar methods)<p>As Powershell is one of the thing that I know quite, I had thought about using Azure Functions (which I never used) as it can run Powershell, but I am open to other options as long as it doesn't mean becoming a full stack dev..<p>I am often lurking on HN and reading about automation tools, no code products, languages and such.
Many nocode tools that I have seen discussed in HN are for internal apps/dashboards (budibase etc.) and bubble.io and similar might be expensive for running a free application (I would need to review what they offer and their tiers). Would products like n8n.io help or they would be useful only for the backend/integration part but not for building a user facing interface?
What would you suggest to use to develop such app?<p>thanks
start by reading the terms of use for any of the sites you intend to poll.<p>then plan on at least one of said sites blocking your service.<p>think over whether you want to be invested in an arms race, or if you have any interest talking directly with the companies whose services you would monitor.<p>tl;dr think about the non-code parts very carefully before taking any architectural advice you get here and running with it.