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.
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.
The way I see it would be something like:
- 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.. )
- 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)
- 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)
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..
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?
thanks
