AutomationTown

 Previously on Automation Town, they ran out of operations. You telling me this entire disaster happened because this make account ran out of monthly operations, not just that. Look over here, there's a spike. Where did the spike come from? Click this. Enhance. See right there? What is that? At nine 15, a new scenario is, That consumed.

Holy cow. That's where all their operations went. Chad, who created that scenario? Jm. That has to be Jake Mccr Barry. It has to be that Manuel Burke mayor with 29 of 31 precincts reporting. We are officially able to call it Chad Davis will become the next mayor of Automation. Town Talks are in progress with the teacher's union about renegotiating a plan for 2024.

I will brief you on that further tomorrow. Public Works plans to go live with a fallback water treatment facility this week. Parks and Recreation has requested Wait, wait that week. Wait, you said fallback water treatment

doors open. This looks like, um, what is this? Some sort of control room. Check out these pipes. Wow. Some kind of utility water. Tradition in automation town. When one mayor replaces the other, they leave a note for their successor. A note from Jake, I must admit, it was a pleasant surprise to have the opportunity to sit where you sit now, to walk the halls.

You'll walk each day to understand how automation town works from the inside. Goodbye for now, mayor Davis. I see bright things in our future.

Illustrations plus games and puzzles. Today through this exclusive TV offer, you can get 12 fascinating issues of Zoo Books for the special price of 1995. When you call and use your credit card, we'll include the elephants issue as a gift plus, you'll also get the colorful collection of animal stickers in the Tiger poster.

So order Zoo Books to Jake Honey. Yes. Fascinating issues. I need to use the restroom. Can you unhook me?

Thank you, dear. Oh, I love that suit on you. I hate these things. This is a waste of time.

It's the right thing to do. Besides you learn the most about yourself when you face your failures head on. So you lost the election. You're still the mayor of Manuel. Just think what your father would say. I'm not sure what dad would say if he was here. Your father was a great man and he loved you very much, but Jakey, you are the man you are today because you lost your father.

You've turned your suffering into hope, into stability for so many people. I won't let anyone take from me what they took from my father.

Do you need more applesauce? I'll be fine. When will you be home? I'll be home late. I need to take care of a few things after the ceremony. Love you sweetie. Love you. See you tonight.

Stickers and Tiger poster with your order. Four. Four must

oh oh two sides to every coin. Davis. That's really sweet. Today, Jake and Chad, they meet for the first time. Jake's never met any of the gang in real life, has he? No. That changes today. And webhooks, webhooks, webhooks, the Swiss army knife of integrations, all of that on this week's absolutely heartwarming edition of Automation Town.

I am so sick of this rain.

I am so sick of this drive,

Jake. What do you mean the last shipment isn't here yet?

That doesn't matter. You think I care how they got their hands on it. This is happening in 36 hours time. I don't care what you need to do to get it. This has to go through tomorrow. We have only one chance. This understood.

I had a problem with it. It has to be an ointment for that sort of thing. Speaking of incompetence, I haven't found it. We probably shouldn't be playing doctors, should we? No, definitely not. Probably worth seeing a doctor about that one. Gerald, one more? Yeah, probably time for one more. Hey Pat. Next question please.

From Oliver. Hey boys. First of all, congrats to you Chad. You did it . Thanks. Tardar emoji. Tarda emoji. Uh, whoops. Partying underscore face emoji confetti underscore ball emoji. You know, Siri does this too. Women with bunny is partying emoji. Whoa. Look out Tardar emoji. You'll make a great mayor of automation town.

A question for you about webhooks. It's a word I hear a lot. It sounds scary, but I've heard they are powerful. I just haven't gotten my head around them. Can you give me an explain it like I'm five run through web hoax. I mean, it feels like that's the glue that keeps a lot of these automations we're running together.

But for me personally, it took a long time to even understand like what they were and it was a pretty big lift to actually use it. Jason, like, pretend I'm five. What is a web book and why should I care? I wanted to make you do this. Okay. Explain like I'm five web book. . So when you go to a website, google.com, whatever you type that in, it's calling a server and the server gives you the stuff back to load on your screen.

And in some ways a web hook is similar, but you're like sending your own payload to an address. Is that a bad analogy? It's kind of going the other way, isn't it? There's another analogy you can say. It's like a toy box. Okay? Every time you put a new toy in your toy box, you want to tell your friend about it.

So normally you'd like yell or the next time they come over, you tell them about it. Oh, wow. But what if, what if ? The web hook is like a special phone that automatically talks to your friend. Every time you put a new toy in your toy box, that's kind of like what a web hook is. I don't know that we've helped anybody here.

Uh, the lesson here is it's hard to explain to a five year old and I over expect what my five year old will understand . Uh, so in short, it's a way you use webhooks to like automatically send a thing to another thing whenever something happens. So for example, Stripe, the payment process. You can create web hooks to be called whenever certain events happen.

So if you complete a checkout session, then you give it a web address and you say, every time this happens, I want you to send the details of this transaction to this address that I gave you. So you define the web hook address, and for like Chad and I, that usually means over on the zappier side or the make side, you.

An automation where the trigger step is this web hook address that it generates for you. So it gives you a URL as a web hook address, and then that web hook address I plug into Stripe, and then anytime that event happens, it's going to trigger that other. Automation. Gonna send them some data? Yeah, it's gonna send data to that automation and then you can do kind of all the subsequent steps.

And that's kind of why it's like the Swiss Army knife. Web hooks are sort of a standardized way of sending data across the internet. And so when most of your apps will support that in some form or another, it's just a nice standardized way to get something from a. I think the way that I started to conceptualize and feel how like important it was, was when like certain apps just wouldn't connect with each other, and you needed a way to do that.

Like, oh, how do they actually connect? And you realize it's webhooks. Webhooks is like the language of the internet that connects. That connects things together that don't connect together normally. So once you know, you wrap your head around that holy cow, then you get into some more technical things about the different types of web hooks and what do you include with them and like all that kind of fun stuff.

But from a purely intro perspective, if you aren't aware or haven't played with web hooks very much, but you're into wanting to move and automate data around, it's a really good in. . It's admittedly a confusing thing. I think what got me over the hump was a YouTube video, and here we are trying to explain technical things over a podcast again, but to kind of visualize what that looks like from data going to A to B, what role do I play in that?

Like am I creating the web address, like it was a bit abstract for me to get my head around. Honestly, like it's, you're probably a five minute YouTube video away from that thing making total sense, and it's probably one of the biggest impact things that I learned that helped me think through just what it means to connect different systems.

Okay. Then we have to set a warning if you're gonna play with it. And you're gonna watch a YouTube video on it. Stick with get type web hooks and not post ones. And we'll get into that later . But let's just stick with get for now. It's a little safer. Oh guys, you gotta go. Let's wrap it up. Well, let's wrap it up from there.

Chad, uh, as always, thanks gang for tuning in and keep those questions coming. Nice work gang. I can't get over how realistic pat sounds. This may be Chad's peace to resist dance. Yeah. The other day when I got to the rv, I could hear Chad talking with Pat. That didn't happen. Yes it did. Aw. Oh cute. Isn't it?

That's sweet. That's not weird at all. Chad, do you talk with Pat outside the show? I mean, I have to test Pat, so I mean, single guy living in an RV by himself with his ai. Wasn't there a movie like this? Yeah. No, I'm with Amelia here. You're making it creepy. Yeah, it is a little creepy. I've gotta go. Let's go.

We've gotta go. We're riding together, right? You wanna take the RV down there? Yeah, we may as well carpool. How you feeling? Feeling nervous. Are they gonna do the whole swearing in hand on the Bible sort of thing? Yeah, I mean, I, I got the impression it's that sort of ceremony. Usually the past mayor comes, but yesterday at least it didn't sound like Jake would be making an appearance, so who knows?

Just imagine if he did. I'd actually love to meet him in. All right, I'm gonna go get changed. Hey, Paul, want to drive? Sure. Fuck, boy.

Um, I have a question about web hooks. All right. I'm gonna go get changed. I'll be right back. Yeah. Webhook Amelia and I were working on her fitness coaching app. Kick Camp. Kick Camp? Yeah. Kick camp. We're going for summer camp Vibes. Oh. Oh. We're having some trouble wiring up in different parts of the app, notably the payment calendar and booking parts.

Pretty important, but I'm thinking maybe webhooks could help us, but I still don't really have my head wrapped around like how they work. What's a real practical example? Like, can I set up a web hook in Zapier? What would that look like? Yeah, for sure. That's where I got started. Uh, let me actually whip out a laptop and we can just kind of run through it real quick.

Eyes on the road, Paul. So take a look at this. Just real nuts and bolts. I'm gonna create his app. The trigger step, what Zapier calls it, is Web hooks by Zapier. So your trigger step is always what starts the automation. So the name of that trigger inside of Zapier is just Web Hooks by Zapier. And then you're gonna pick an event Catch hook.

Sometimes they'll use Catch Raw Hook, but what it gives you is a web hook URL to send that data to. So this is like a custom one-off URL that Zappier just generated for you to. With this automation, so that on that other service where the data's going to come from, this is the URL that you give to that service so that anytime that event triggers, it'll send that payload, that data to this url the zapper just generated for us.

And then in the subsequent steps in this app, we can do anything that we want with that data. Pretty straightforward. Me's got more or less the same thing. Your incoming web hooks generally gonna be your trigger step cuz you want that stuff to happen. Anytime there's new data to process and they've got a similar trigger node that just will generate these one of one URLs that you use and every time it gets new data, it'll kick off the automation.

Ta-da. How do I look? Very dashing, a cumber bun. Is it too much? It looks great. Did I miss anything? Jab on the web hooks? Yeah. So the other side of web hooks, instead of receiving them is actually calling them. So that was receiving a web hook, using a web hook as a trigger for an automation. Yes, but you can also call a web hook yourself.

Call a web hook yourself. So what I just walked through was receiving a web hook. To be super clear, that's the receiving side, but let's talk about the opposite of that. The calling side. Yeah. I mean like this is the powerful one. This is where you can run one automation. It can. Trigger another automation, and you don't have to have one big, massive, massive thing happening.

I mean, we've done this in the past when we needed to bridge even different automation systems. Do you remember that one from one of the earlier episodes? Yeah. Weren't we bridging I F T T T, like a smart home thing to Zapier make or something? The lights. The lights, the office lights. That's what it was.

That's what it was. People will run into this a lot where the easy lift is to use the system that integrates with your tool. So like for in that situation, it was like a Miros, or I forget what it was called, lighting system. And I F T T T had a really great integration with all kinds of settings, but make didn't, and we were integrating it with something that make did really well with another system.

Like, uh, I think it was maybe. Might have been a calendar or a Zoom thing. And what we wanted to do was start it and make, and then finish it off in I F T T T. And the way we did that was by using web hooks at the very end of the Integra mat or make scenario and then making sure that in I F T T T it received that information.

Now when you receive information like that, you can use a different type of web book, uh, called a post web book, and. By sending data through that post request, it can update another thing, like in this case, sending information over to the Web Poke and I F T T T, and then it can do everything that you tell it to in that system.

So I think the context where most people probably start is just by. Receiving web hooks, that's probably the first thing you ever do is you create a Maker's app, your automation that receives a web hook and your trigger step is that receiving web hook. But then the bigger unlock to realize there is, you know, some apps have functionality to wear on any certain type of event, they'll call that web hook.

And so like Stripe was an example of that area. Table will do that, but then for you to then be able to. Calling webhooks yourself. Mm-hmm. is a big unlock, uh, because just like you said, you can use it to bridge different systems where maybe system A works really well with Zoom and System B works really well with my smart home lights.

How do I connect those two things? And that's where the value of webhooks kind of being like a standard language that all systems understand, that's where that gets really valuable because you can take stuff between systems in a more streamlined way. This is helpful. You guys always know how to fix everything.

It's amazing. Um, this is definitely connecting some dots for me. One thing we have with the app is people can pay for the courses through the gym, and the gym pays that money to Amelia or they can just pay through the app and I sort of end up with these automations that are kind of like, like duplicates of each other.

Yeah. Because I make payments from several sources. We built out the automation for handling each. Both pretty much the same. Yeah. So great use case for web hooks here. One of the things that we talk about with this kind of development for Normies, you still have to think like a developer, and the way that developers design programs and bigger kind of complex things is in as modular of a way as possible for a number of reasons.

One of 'em being just this. Maybe you've got data flowing in from multiple sources, but it largely needs to be handled the same. If you put those two automation processes alongside each other, and they're both 10 steps, if eight of 'em are the same best practices to carve out those common eight steps into its own process and then pipe both of those down.

That thing, and we've all encountered this in various situations in our lives, like having three copies of the same. The problem is you make an update to one copy and then you've gotta make it to the other two. Right? So best practices is how can we pipe this like through a common automation so you don't have these redundancies.

Yeah. I mean, it became such a problem that Zapier created their own sort of method for dealing with these apps, and they called it like subs, apps. Uh, have you ever used them? I don't know that I have actually in the wild. I have, but it was mostly to test it when they announced it. I mean, it's, it's no secret we do a lot of the stuff, um, over in make when this comes to happen.

And theoretically you just have another instance of a operation or a scenario running in Make, and then, you know, you use WebBook to go between them. But I like what Zapier did with subs apps because they can let you do some pretty complex things without needing to. Enter them in like you used to in every single app that you are working on.

So if you get into some complicated ones where you need things like security tokens or you need to run the same sort of formatting. Time and time again, you can create these subs, apps that you can share amongst your team. Kinda like building blocks, right? Yeah. And like no one has to reinvent the wheel when you're doing some sort of similar things with your own data set.

I mean, you think about a company, like if you're dealing with either marketing or leads or things like this, you're gonna have people's names and emails and phone numbers across a whole bunch of systems. What if, regardless of how you start, there's this process that runs right before you do anything with the data.

Check to see if they're already a customer, if they're already in the system, if they already have a status or not. That's like a perfect example of a sub Z, and I really like that Zapier did this because there was a, a lot of complaints around just needing to redo the same thing over and over again, and there wasn't a way to copy it.

And now you can, and a lot of people are happier because of it. Yeah. But I especially like the example around those really common things around your. If you've got five different workflows that need to, you know, check something in your crm, your database, or something like that, it's a great use case. Kind of those common building blocks that you're gonna need in a bunch of different contexts.

That's a good place to start. I think why I haven't used them is they're really a simplification of what we're talking about. That is web hooks and being able to call your own web hooks because you can get to the same place by having an automation that's triggered by web. And at the end of another automation or maybe midstream on an automation, you call that other web hook that you created, and then the web hook gives a response to say, okay, got it.

We're done. Or, no, there is a conflict there, or something like that. And so it is something that you can build yourself, but this is really what Zapier is good at. Norming the more complex. Heavy lift dev stuff that can be intimidating for regular people. And that's really kind of what subs apps are, I guess is a simplification of this kind of modular concept we're talking about.

Combine that with some code steps and some formatting steps and yeah, you've just got this scenario where you're no longer the like the only person in the company that can do a thing. You can share that and other people. Completely unlocks their ability to hit certain parts of your systems that you just may never have given access to before because it's so sensitive.

No, you're good. What another thing I tell people too is if there's part of your application that's out of reach from the native Zapier connectors, maybe there's an API you need to get into to do a specific thing, but there isn't a great native connector in Zapier or make to do. It's really easy to go out and find somebody to just create that Zapier node that will make that API call for you.

Cuz Zapier has, I mean, you can run code in Zapier, you can make custom HTTP requests, all these things. You can get to all the API endpoints with Zapier steps. But if I use an app that maybe Zapier doesn't connect with, but it has an API and there's, you know, four or five things I need to do in there, man, go out and pay for a couple hundred bucks of a developer's.

They're gonna set up all those API calls for you in a Zapier scenario, and that's a great use case for actually using it as a Sub Z. Brilliant, because you can have somebody build it once for you and then reuse that functionality in all of your other workflows. This makes so much more sense. Now. Wait, I didn't tell you guys.

I ran into Gill at the, oh shoot. Grocery story the other day. Gil, I was surprised. He recognized me. , but he was talking about a position in your cabinet. Yeah. I need to call Gil. I'm gonna bring him on halftime actually with some stuff. Excuse me. Wow. Gil's the first one to get offered a cabinet position.

Gil. Hey. He asked me and he is a good fit. Mayor Davis. Chad's fine. Hi Gil, how can I help you about joining my cabinet Director of finance? Yes, I'd love to bring you on board. Oh my. It's just be a halftime gig though. Cream and almonds, 20 hours a week. Director of finance. Oh, Chad, you'd be a great fit. Oh, and I could frankly use the help, Chad, you don't know how happy this makes me.

So you're in. Oh, I am in. Hey, can we switch to video conference? Uh, sure. Wow. Is, is that a It's a slide deck. Okay. So check this out Gil. I gotta run in a minute. So, live flow. Live flow. So live flow. We've talked about how I use live flow for budgeting because it'll sync live QuickBooks data out to Google sheets by class and all that, right?

But we're managing big budgets now, other people's money. Uh, And we need to show where that money's going. So here's what we set up with live flow on a client of mine. The board has private access to a site where they can see updating budget statuses and an overview of spending by budget. This is starting to sound like a profit and lost by class.

That's right. So because we can sync standard QuickBooks reports like Profit and Lost by Class out to Google Sheets, I can wire up my Google sheets to a. Seeking out budgeting data, spending data. So bridge the data from Google Sheets to a site that stakeholders are, in this case, residents of automation town can access.

Yeah. Or keep it simple, just build a customized spreadsheet, embed that spreadsheet on the page and live flow will keep syncing live reporting data from the QuickBooks reports over to the spreadsheets. Yeah. I love the transparency. This enables Chad, I can't wait to roll up my sleeves on some of this stuff.

Well, welcome aboard Gill. I'm looking forward to getting started as well. It's a great day to build with live. Okay, Gil Automation Pod. Woo. Talk to you later. Gil. I'll see you at the ceremony. Oh, you're gonna be there on my way as we speak. I'm almost there, Gil. What's that? Gil? I gotta run some jacking and RV's about to run me off the road.

Watch where you're driving. Do you know who I am? I'm the director of Finance for Renovation Town. Ugh, sorry. Woo. Bless his heart. Do you have a, am I headed to a special mayoral parking spot or are we gonna need to park this boat in this tiny parking lot? Yeah, pull it around back. They painted a double wide spot, believe it or not.

Nice. Double wide.

See y'all in a bit. Bye. You're gonna do great. Good luck. I know. Hello? Hey, cut. Those are your friends. Those are my friends. You are looking dashing. Uh, comfort button. Is it too much? You know, we'll handle wardrobe for you, right? Oh, we've got a lot to cover. I know you've been busy, but we need to carve out some time.

I know, I know, I know. Gimme a day or two. We can go through it all. Let's start walking. Jake's already in the staging area. Jake Mccr Barry. He turned up after all. So here's how this usually goes. The ceremony opens up with some feel goodery. You've got a children's choir singing a couple of songs. Wait, I'm sorry, Jake's here now.

Uh, they'll sing a couple of songs. Then the custom is for the outgoing there to say a few words and introduce you for your first mayoral speech. Is that a good idea? Admittedly, we. Haven't had circumstances like this before, which makes this one a little uncomfortable, but whatever quarrels you've had in the past need to be set aside.

You work for the people of Automation Town now through here.

Yeah. The choir will wrap up in a few minutes. We'll have you both come out at the same time and Jake will introduce you. Chad. Got it.

The man himself. Jake Mccr Barry, Chad Davis. Firm Grip you've got there. My father was a minor. Uh, what. That have two strong hands runs in the family, all that manual work and proud of it. You sabotaged my radio show. You brainwashed my town. You tried to bury me under a building. I don't know anything about that.

I'm sure you don't. You know, Chad, you and I have more in common than you. I would like to think so. I was like you once hungry for change full of ideas to make the world a better place. Really. But you know what? They don't tell you about change. What's that? The cost. The number of people who are lost and forgotten for the sake of change.

Shiny object. Society doesn't care about the person who just got laid. The person whose identity is stripped from them when a company memo renders them pointless. All the name of what? Capitalism Turning a quick buck, A few more widgets an hour? No. What you don't see in the vanity metrics are the number of families torn apart by change that can never be put back together again.

Hmm. What happens if we never change? Look around you, Davis. Is life so bad? Are we struggling so much that this just can't be enough? No. Progress is a hamster wheel. The harder you run, the quicker you realize you're stuck in the same cage as the rest of us.

Jake, let me. The water pipeline running from Manuel Bird to Automation Town. You're up, boys Smile Davis. Look confident. People don't care what the plan is, so long as someone looks like they've got one

great turnout today.

Let me. By acknowledging the elephant in the room, the building you knocked over the time you took over my radio show, Manuel Burke and Automation Town, we have some ideological differences. You think it's in the name, but having the opportunity to spend three months with the fine people of this town has been a reminder that we are more the same than different.

Our two towns were founded together as Sister Towns over 100 years. Not as bitter rivals, rather as complimentary partners with ideological differences. Yes, but that doesn't mean we can't work together. Mayor Davis and I were just discussing the new joint water initiative water initiative tomorrow. You don't think that's the control room in the subway tunnels.

Those were huge pipes. It did look like some kind of utility. Wait, so the pipeline under automation town is being controlled by Manuel. What about the grummy breaking? Didn't we decide that was to get into the control room? I don't like the sound of that. Look at Chad. It looks like he just saw a ghost.

But I hope is a sign of more collaboration to come in the future. Now the man behind me needs no introduction automation town from one mayor to another. I'm proud to introduce to you your new mayor, Chad Davis. Hey, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, mayor McREL Berry. Chad was not expecting what Jake just said.

What does this mean? Jake created the water disaster. Why would he give us the solution? Uh, familia. Paul, you want to go down to the titles with me? . Oh, Paul, I thought you'd never ask. Full score. And three months ago I was at a turning point in my life, but a humble servant to the people of automation town.

I was just a guy with a radio show and a 19 95, 32 foot Winnebago Dream weaver, and there came a day when I looked in the mirror. And I look at myself in the mirror and I said, self

Automation town is written and produced by Chad Davis and Jason Staats edited by Paula O’Mara. Keep up with the characters of Automation Town on Twitter at Automation Town.