Being winter (it’s late October in Seattle – don’t kid yourself that there are more than two seasons here), I’m cold almost all the time.  It doesn’t help that I’m an environmentalist (read: cheapskate) who keeps the heat set at 65 degrees during the day when normal people are at work. Luckily, working on programming (I own you, Google Apps Script!) and programming classes, I have two things to keep me warm: a computer and a doggie, both competing for lap space in the big chairs in the living room.

Annie wants to dominate the computer, so she licks it.  Surprisingly, dog saliva only seems to make computers work better, not worse, since whenever she licks it, I solve some other programming problem.  As that beer commercial says, It’s only weird if it doesn’t work.  And I didn’t even have to grill a quinoa burger.

If you’d like to see exactly how I dominated Google Apps Script, please check out my code on github (jwicksnin).  Here’s a quick rundown:

After creating a script to send emails with the current user address, and send responses to another spreadsheet, I now have an app that…

• Creates a button on the spreadsheet for any user send a reminder email
• In the background, onclick, the script compares the original spreadsheet names with the responses spreadsheet.
• Flattening an array of both spreadsheets’ names, finds those who haven’t responded.
• Sends a reminder email similar to the original email to those who haven’t responded yet.
• Makes a very merry January for donors who receive gift baskets after confirming their mailing addresses.

Pretty awesome!  Now people at work won’t even have to know about the scripts in order to use them. And that, after all, just might be the mark of a good computer program.