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by eallam 1239 days ago
Zapier is great for non-developers, and as developers we've even used Zapier in the past because in some simple cases it's actually easier and more reliable than writing the code yourself! It's not easy to write code that connects even just a few services together, and handles transient errors and server interruptions, usually it takes some kind of infrastructure and maintenance, and can no longer be written in the normal way (and good luck with delays!).

We wanted to bring the convenience of Zapier (you describe the request you want to do, they figure out how to do it!) back into our codebases, without having to manage a bunch of infrastructure (that's where trigger.dev comes in).

While we were at it we built this as a general purpose event-driven system, complete with AWS Event Bridge like event pattern filtering, and also added the ability to listen for webhooks reliably without having to use a tunnel to your local machine when testing locally.

1 comments

> It's not easy to write code that connects even just a few services together, and handles transient errors and server interruptions, usually it takes some kind of infrastructure and maintenance, and can no longer be written in the normal way (and good luck with delays!).

Based on the example shown, it looks like Trigger.dev handles all this while allowing you to write code pretty close to what I would call "in the normal way." I haven't tried it myself, but if the examples work as advertised, it looks pretty attractive to me.