Stop using Zapier, Make, n8n

welcome back to the internet guys and today I'm going to be showing you trigger which I freaking love and before I get into this I just want to say in no way am I affiliated with trigger apart from that I do want to see them succeed because I just really love this product and if they went away I would well I wouldn't contemplate uh but my point is that you rarely find a product where if it went away you would be really pissed like if the iPhone went away I just buy a pixel you know

it's not that hard but if trigger went away I seriously don't know what I would do and don't worry guys because I know it looks a little bit technical but I'm going to explain why it's actually extremely easy to use but before we get into that I'm going to talk about the problem the problem that we actually have to solve because a lot of businesses and side projects they run in either two places okay so a lot of your automations and business logic as it's called is going to run on either somewhere like zappier make

n an one of these code platforms I'll show you my n right here and the other way to do it is to basically just write all your code have it run on a server somewhere or in the back end of your website and there is a Ocean between those two options cuz one of them is super easy you drag and drop and then the other you literally have to know how to code and you have to do all this stuff and know how to set up a server it's a massive difference and they also have

a lot of their problems like in their own so first of all zaper is clunky I have a video where I was talking about how you should use n an and I trash zapier I still hate zapier so uh you can just try zapier for yourself if you don't uh if you won't take my word for it N is a lot better but I just want to show you I mean this is my n i I built a decent amount in here and if we just load this up I mean first of all it takes

forever to load and then this is my workflow and dude there are so many problems when it comes to editing I made that video last time a little bit uh preemptively because when it comes to actually like editing your workflow you have to go you have to test each step individually so you hit test step and then you pin the previous data but I kept getting this problem where I'd hit test and it wouldn't work and you can't just like you have to refresh the page and then you have to redo the whole workflow and

it becomes a massive pain in the ass to use and that's just the problem because it's no code it's very like uh abstracted and you're always going to Fig problems um where you just can't solve it and it takes a ton of time the other thing with no code is I found that yeah it's pretty it's pretty fast if I want to add like a web hook I mean there it is that's an endpoint I'll click out of it but there it is that's our endpoint and then we can like customize the URL but and

now it's not even working I can't oh geez dude um although it's good to actually like build things with no code um and it's kind of fast you end up up getting stuck at a lot of places where you just can't do something that you could in a more sophisticated environment like you basically just like any of these things I'll probably get hung up and because it's an in like a UI interface like if we go to this part where I have to get the company access token because it's a weird API they have a

really weird way of like requesting the data oh no all right my light died but I'm back they have a really weird way of requesting the data and it ends up being a problem because in order to get this like all correct you can't just copy from their documentation like the fetch request you can't just copy and paste because there no code you have to fiddle around for like 3 hours until you fix it where in a more sophisticated environment it might take 10 minutes to get it set up Pro probably less so that's kind

of the downside of no code and why I recommend kind of learning something a little bit more sophisticated but then then we come over to something more sophisticated and again we have a problem I mean first of all this is a JavaScript document which I'll talk about in a second but let's just go to let's just go to the uh logs here and I'm just going to show you what the actual problem is because this this is what you get when you're looking when you're running basically code on a server you get a log section

here where they just give you a bunch of red lines and a bunch of black and white lines and yeah you can output data to it but it gives you zero context into how well things are working how fast they're executing you have to literally like build a separate product to actually figure out what's going on here and it just becomes a massive pain in the ass so that's why I say there's a Ocean between something like this and something like this which are both bad and uh I mean there's just been no solution until

I started using trigger so let's get into it now first of all the definition of trigger as defined by the co-founder or CEO or whoever he is it's described as the technical version of zapier which I totally agree and I totally love um quick example so with zapier you get a lot of Integrations and Trigger has this stuff built in for you so you get open AI mail gun twilio resend whatever you actually need like all this stuff and amazingly they have a notion integration which I like using notion you can integrate with WS air

table you can basically integrate with whatever you need and by the way they're also backed by superpa base so you can integrate with a lot of these different tools without having to like mess around with apis on your own but we should explain a little bit more about what trigger dodev actually is and how it works because I'm sure you're confused I was extremely confused for a long time so essentially what they do is they allow you to write your workflows and then deploy them to their servers or you can self-host it which is more

complexity than I actually want um and then they handle all this kind of stuff that's like such a pain in the ass to deal with on like a typical server or even an N so let's say you're making a call to a like open API open AI their API I mean a lot of the time your call is just going to fail it's like when you're talking to chat jbt and it just doesn't respond it just shows an error you have to actually like copy your message and paste it again and that's a problem if

you're relying on that workflow to actually serve your customers so with trigger dodev they're going to automatically retry failed tasks and naan just doesn't have that it fails and then you're out of luck I mean if it fails like you better you better uh have a way to know about it so what trigger doev does is it host your code it allows you to actually look at all of your runs so I'm going to pull up my trigger and if I just go to my current project then something really cool is here so first of

all we can see every single task that I have set up and we can see like a map of all the activity and failures and all that stuff but the cool thing is if we look at the Run logs it's actually going to show you exactly what the workflow is doing so it's going to show you okay yes it started on the Chron chronological uh schedule and then it ran and here's the output all right I'll try to give a a little bit of a a better example cuz this right here this is a fat

ass workflow and basically what it's going to do is it's going to break down the whole workflow for you so you get all as much like reporting and visualization into what's happening same with same thing with like uhan which doesn't have this you you have no idea to tell like to tell how long something's taking and with this you can literally see like okay this step took 885 milliseconds cuz I was calling an API and then this uh API called to uh open AI yeah anyways this one uh getting the cost of the call that

was only you know 100 milliseconds and you can actually see all this data which becomes so valuable the other thing about trigger uh the like n an or zapier can't handle is if you're running a business on it well you're going to deploy your product and if you get customers your customers are going to want your product to work obviously right and you're going to want to change things but as you change things you're going to break things and typically in a in a typical like Enterprise business you're GNA have or any business you're going

to have a development and then you're going to have a production um kind of staging and with trigger. da you can easily like get like everything started on your computer locally test everything out and then when it's ready to go you deploy it to the servers so that the customers can actually use it so you basically like prevent yourself from shooting yourself in the foot I mean with an an if I want to make a little change here and I accidentally make a mistake I'm going to have to and okay and I make a mistake

and then I press save on accident I haven't changed anything I don't think and it wants me to save but if I press save that could something up in the back end and I have no idea so that's why trigger that di is so strong but there's one thing that does tend to be pretty nice about an an and zapier and and all these kind of things and I mean let let's try to put together a demo here so if we just go refresh location so we'll test this so we'll hit test step this is

a cron trigger it supposed to fire every 20 hours so let's test that and then I'll pin this data so we can use it in the next step and then I'll come to list locations and what we're going to do here is oh wait actually these are uncoupled I'll I'll test this one CU I want to get some fresh data and then for this one if you can see we're using uh data from the last step in this in this step right here okay so all I need to do is I go from refresh token

so I'm going to grab that refresh token just drop it in there and boom we're good to go obviously I I don't want to do that um but yeah all you do is you drag and drop from one step to the other and that's why no code is so easy but I'm going to show you something that I recently started using and it's it's been insane if you're not a developer you might be screaming right now don't worry don't worry I will I will make this simple and easy um let's let's let's let's get an

example going here so this is my trigger dodev code and don't worry it's it's not hard to code um this is my trigger. Dev code and it's written in typescript typescript is a type of JavaScript it's actually a superet of JavaScript so you have JavaScript and then you have typescript so you can write everything in in typescript and it gets compiled to JavaScript which means it can run basically anywhere so the advantage of typescript I'm going to show that right now because what we're doing in this workflow here is we're using a stripe uh the

stripe integration to charge a customer and this can actually be a bit of a pain in the ass all right and by the way if I wanted to do this in no code I don't even know if I could I mean it's like a specialized use case and anything that's not remotely normal is going to be a pain in the ass and no code so anyways what we're doing is we're creating a payment intent and after that after we create that payment intent then we also want to get the default payment method off of the

customer all right and the cool thing about this is look at this long ass line of code I I don't know what this is I don't know like why it looks like this right but what we can do is we can say say uh payment method we'll just Define a new variable and we'll say that's going to be await um maybe we don't have to wait it it's going to be uh stripe or it's going to be our payment intent Dot and then if I tried to do like payment method here I mean first of

all I spelled this wrong so that's going to that's going to be an issue but but wait all right it was a bad example because payments attend exist but if I if I try to do type and I hover it over it it's going to tell me it says TS typescript property type does not exist on this type of object because this is the object that we're we're creating and it's saying this type does not exist which is so useful because when you're normally coding you dude it's like so hard to guess because literally you

would be looking at stripe documentation you'd be coming back here you'd be like okay is it type info and then it's still not going to work it's going to say no it doesn't exist and if you were just doing JavaScript you would compile this you would run it or you wouldn't compile it but you would just run it and you would get an error and uh that's not going to happen with Ty script it's literally going to tell you exactly what exists and what doesn't it's basically like drag and drop editing um and and let

me try to break down just another example here so if we go over to my call recording workflow so this is the workflow that handles a phone call being finished and then the call recording being dropped to my task and this is extremely useful this is something you can Define in typescript it's called an interface or I believe I can change this type and it's the same no never mind um but essentially this is going to tell your code in your program like or actually it's going to tell typescript what your payload is going to

look like like what the data you're dealing with is going to look like so if we go down to somewhere where I'm using let's go like location ID so if we go down to this and if I said okay payload do location ID and I tried to use that it's going to tell me right now that location ID does not exist on the payload that I sent in it has to be location ID and this is such an enormous timesaver and also an enormous just benefit to your entire life that uh I mean it it

basically makes coding like no code I mean there's still a bit of a learning curve but really like I I would be I would be a week back in my development process um if I wasn't using typescript so that brings us on to our second benefit of uh trigger and basically it's that you get to pick your your own IDE I mean an IDE if you're not sure is a uh an integrated development environment so I'm using Zed you could also use VSS code is extremely popular you could use Vim you could use text edit

and here we are with that same uh stripe uh workflow that we were just looking at in text edit I mean you could use this it's terrible it it's horrible I mean you would never want to do this but you could I mean the the benefit of doing that is just amazing like you can actually use whatever program you want to edit your workflow and it just make it just makes for such a better development experience um but the other thing about using your own IDE is let me remind myself is co-pilot you may have

heard about GitHub co-pilot and how their some lawsuit is happening because they're using other people's code to train a robot that replaces them and I just want to say I love co-pilot and this is one of the biggest benefits of trigger is that you can actually work with co-pilot to build your your execution programs so let's just uh let's just get a really good example so okay so to demonstrate this we're back in our stripe charge workflow now what I used to have here is that if the payment failed it would basically just wait a

day and then it would return um but we could actually automate the way that it charges customers so if they're payment fails the first day it'll wait one day and then it'll charge them again and let's actually just get rid of this I want to basically make it so that it waits one day and then it tries to charge them again then a couple days so I'm just going to write that out in comments so we'll say if payment fails uh wait for a day and Retreat I mean is there anything else to that um

if payment fails wait for a day no payment failed wait for a day and then we'll say um um add tag failed payment and then we'll say and that tag by the way I'll show you is uh really useful in trigger I mean it's I don't know if it's useful yet but it it'll kind of show you like what your runs are so I can see okay so these message here are from Facebook and social and there social messages so that way I can basically break down my runs when I'm going to the bug later

on um but say payment failed wait for a day add tag failed payment and then one other benefit of trigger that I just thought of is you can run tasks for like I don't know indefinitely like a really long time so if I say wait for a day it's fine it's going to pick up in a day whereas if you were using something like a AWS Lambda or something else like a serverless environment you would be getting charged a million dollars to let it run for a day because they're keeping the server open for you

whereas here they have a way to shut it down and then uh rewake it up when it's ready so anyways um we're going to confirm the payment and then attempt to charge again so let's see how this goes I haven't I mean I've done this a couple times but we have co-pilot you've probably seen co-pilot in the background when I start to type something it's going to give me a suggestion dude all right so there we go so it's saying basically if I press tab I can accept that change all right so we'll go payment

failed uh wait for a day so we'll go boom it look at this it's looking at these comments and it's doing exactly what I want so I'm like I'm like freaking just dying over here just like bro I've been working for 12 hours and I don't know what to type and then I press enter and it just types exactly what I need and then we'll go await charge again and this is going to be a bit of a challenge because it's a bit further up but let's say um we'll just do a wait or no

we'll do const try try again and look at this dude it's literally filling in that entire same line from up above that we were just using it used the same payment intent id that we had and if I press enter then it'll will'll pull in the exact same values that we needed and then I can press tab again to accept that and we have the exact same l i mean this is a weird example because I'm literally could have copy pasted the line but it's writing it for you without you having to know the actual

syntax you just write comments and then it writes the code for you while you basically sit there and press Tab and uh that is the absolute best thing about I mean co- pilot is amazing and then I just I just want to give one more example because with typescript co-pilot Works amazing because basically I'm trying to call this function right here and you have to like organize it in a specific way so that it actually functions properly and this can be kind of a pain in the ass you have to keep switching back and say

okay what what type of object does this one need and with typescript you can basically just go okay so I want to I know I want to send the type so it's going to be that and then the code is going to be that yep yep and then I mean then we're going to Define our Q or we'll just do an in potency key and boom I mean there's a little bit of a formatting error here but dude it's absolutely insane it literally writes code for you like copilot is one of those products that you

just never get bored of like every day you have that moment where you just like oh tab tab tab and you write like two minutes of code in five seconds is amazing so I love co- pallet and I mean biggest thing is you get to use co- pallot and typescripts with um trigger so then the last thing is serverless I'll bundle this from uh with the last benefit serverless Computing and concurrency and let's also say cu's and uh okay so I'm going to bundle all this together but basically if we go back back I mean

I'll just I'll just scroll through this so you can see but you can run jobs all at the same time you don't have to worry about setting up a server and managing infrastructure and all this stuff because that's a pain in the ass um and then there's a couple things called concurrency and itm potency and when you're dealing with things like charges and like money itm potency is extremely important because if someone refreshes the page and every time they refresh the page you're sending data to your server to charge them or to give them money

you don't want it to just work every single time they refresh their page so typically you'll have some type of itm potency where you'll refresh the page once it'll send that special value to the server and then the server every time it gets it from then on will know okay we've already process this that's it imp potency that means that and otherwise dude it's such a pain in the ass you have to like create like a whole table in your database to store all this stuff to measure to manage it and with trigger you don't

they literally include it if we come back here we're passing in the so this is when it actually like charges the customer or this is when we adjust the balance of the customer this is a good example we're passing in an itm potency key so that means when we're adjusting this balance we only want it to happen once with this uh payment intent which is like a stripe charge uh value so we only want that to happen once and then the concurrency key basically this is sick because if we look at our adjust balance method

okay we're pulling out we're pulling out the company balance so we're looking in the database we're saying okay uh yeah wait where's it going to be company um select balance okay so we're selecting the balance so we're pulling out the balance and then I'm doing a couple things in between and then I'm updating that balance with the new amount so the new balance is going to be the past balance plus the the the change and then eventually here we're upserting or we're updating that one record with the New Balance but there could be a scenario

where okay so there could be a scenario where you're reading the balance right here and the balance is $100 at start and then task two right here is reading the balance a millisecond after and it also sees $100 but then when the first task goes to write it's saying minus $50 so a $50 charge it's going to write 150 right or no it's going to write 50 good thing that looks like a dollar sign so it's going to write $50 to the database but then task number two is adding $50 and it also saw 100

at the start so it's going to write 100 + 150 so you're basically giving the customer a free $50 in this scenario and you have to like figure out how to solve this and the great thing about trigger is that stuff is solved for you it's not going to wrate to the database at the same time because we're using a where the oh we're using a a concurrency key right here which is the company ID so for the same company for the same balance value it can't write at the same time we have a limit

of one and yeah I mean uh this video is already really long but hopefully that kind of helps you expl uh understand what trigger is and how it works and why it's so good I know I talked about a lot about typescript and and co-pilot which are amazing but the reality is you don't get these benefits when you use a no code tool like n or zapier or make and you also don't get these benefits I mean you don't get the benefits of actually seeing into your workflow seeing what the data looks like and testing

them um whenever you want with like an actual server it's it's way more of a pain in the ass so anyways triggers is awesome um yeah I'll see you in the next video I guess