EventSheet
I'm not sure how I first got introduced to spreadsheets, but that's where I started. My first one was for grade 7 math. We were calculating volumes and surface areas of cylinders, so I made a spreadsheet for that. I showed my math teacher, and although he was impressed, he said don't use it. I didn't listen.
Then I made trackers for CS:GO and Valorant. Input data, get statistics. I used to play Hypixel Skyblock a lot too, and was interested in becoming very rich in it. The money-making methods I cared about were trading, so I made a spreadsheet for that. I only knew how to use spreadsheets. The first versions were usable but very hard-coded.
The hard part was keeping it updated. The first version fetched game prices through Apps Script, but how do you keep calling the function? I got two cells to cause and undo errors in each other, then used that cycle to trigger another update. Having two cells acting as an engine for things to run in a spreadsheet. Ridiculous.
Then I heard about Python. I could run code on my computer and use Google's API to write to the sheet on a loop. Libraries seemed scary to me. I didn't want to learn how to use a library. I was already trying to learn Python by myself. I was indexing everything in straight Python, using the wrong data structures, whatever the worst solution you could find. Any solution was better than the first version, for sure.
I used the sheets, made lots of money, and actually sold some versions. Then people said, "Hey, you should redo this but better, and I would pay real money for it." See, I was just selling it for in-game coins. So I did. I kept redoing it until I had my magnum opus: almost all the well-known money-making methods, plus some obscure ones I'd discovered myself. Lots of in-game coins were made, and eventually some real money too. But it's a spreadsheet. You're not making thousands. It was just a couple hundred.
But I was still running the backend on my own computer. People in other time zones needed it when I wasn't using it. My dad had a Raspberry Pi, so I used that, hooked up an old monitor, keyboard and mouse, and got the script running there.
I didn't know how to use GitHub or CI/CD. Updates went over on a flash drive, or I opened the text editor on the Pi and edited the script there. What a mess. Thank God I know what CI/CD is now.
Now people wanted to track their own inventories and filter their own recommendations. I wasn't going to have the Python script write the same data separately to every user's spreadsheet and get rate limited. I wrote the recommendation data and tracked inventories to one master sheet. Each user's sheet imported from it and filtered for what they cared about.
It's really hard to make a spreadsheet into a webapp. The user needs to input data, and there's no easy way to do that without giving them access to ruin the whole thing. My workaround was to give each person two linked spreadsheets. They could edit filters and sorting parameters in the input sheet; the sheet displaying their results was view-only. You could swap out the input sheet without letting someone break the display.
To be honest, I was afraid people would judge that I was doing it wrong. I knew I should have made a website or a web app. But I'd seen other people use spreadsheets in strange ways, and that had inspired me. I loved talking with the people using mine. Some of those connections lasted long after the project.
The small invite-only group I'd been sharing it with had stopped giving me much feedback. They were using it, or they had stopped using it, but I wasn't hearing much from them. I wanted more people. A bigger group, public, anyone, come and tell me.