AMA Custom Blocks Contest Edition #1 - Getting Started with the Airtable Product Team (Live on Wednesday 6/10)

[Michelle_Valent]

Do you have an idea for the Custom Blocks contest but don’t know where to start or which examples are most relevant to your idea? We’re hosting a live Ask Me Anything (AMA) session in this thread on Wednesday (6/10) at 11am PT.

Michelle Valentine and Kasra Kyanzadeh from our product team will be available to answer any questions about getting started and turning your ideas into reality.

The top 3 upvoted questions will win a $40 Amazon gift card. You can even start posting your questions now, and we’ll be answering questions live from 11am - 11:30am PT on Wednesday. See you there!

[kuovonne]

Do you have formal names for the different APIs?
Having clear names can make discussions on the community forums easier.

I’ve been calling them the

• Standard REST API (but the docs just call this the Standard API)
• Scripting API
• Custom Blocks API

[Michelle_Valent]

Hi @Ashwin_Kumar,

You are asking the million dollar question! One of the blessings (and challenges) that we have at Airtable is how horizontal and flexible the product is. We serve small businesses and Fortune 500 companies alike. Often our beachhead into a company is serving a particular use case, or piece of their ‘stack’. Users then realize they can use Airtable to meet many of their other use cases too.

For larger customers, we often see folks replacing in-house built tools that would have taken much more engineering time and effort to build and maintain. Users are then empowered - whether they are technical or not - to modify the bases as needed. To your point, there is a lot of benefit from bringing in data from other services and being able to view and modify your data in a flexible tool like Airtable.

Hopefully that helps. Great question.

[Kasra]

Good question! We refer to them in the same way (Standard API, Scripting API, Custom Blocks API). But it’s a good point that maybe “standard API” isn’t as descriptive now that there are other APIs.

[Michelle_Valent]

And we are officially out of time! Thank you so much for joining us today.

We’ll be awarding gift cards to the 3 questions that received the most upvotes: @Matthew_Thomas, @Harshit_Juneja, @Jacob_Cannon. Look out for another AMA same time next week focused on design.

[kuovonne]

Thank you for hosting this session!