AMA Custom Blocks Contest Edition #1 - Getting Started with the Airtable Product Team (Live on Wednesday 6/10)
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!
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Thank you, @Kasra. The picture is becoming a little more clear to me how $ block ... --remote handles this, and the questions in my head are kind of morphing as my understanding of it changes.
In particular, are you exploring ways to make keeping Custom Blocks updated a more seamless process for both creators and consumers of those blocks?
Yep, that’s part of it!
Thanks @Michelle_Valentine,
I’d want to add that the community forum has been quite helpful in the journey on bringing my block idea to life. A lot of questions I had have been already answered by many people building/working on blocks. Most of it all felt just a community search away. t6:
I have a question and a comment :
I’m using a 3rd party API Key in my block that is intended to remain same for all users using the block. What is the best place to store the API Key? What are the guidelines for storing a common API key in general.
Thank you for having some examples out there. They’ve helped in general especially covering some caveats/exceptions of how rendering happens while using the Cursor component. Once the block is in a more matured state (which I would be in say a week or so), I would love to have a quick review or a show and tell with the team to understand areas the block can improve on.
That’s wonderful to hear . And thank you for helping us on this journey as well by offering solutions to the community. Makes a world of difference.
If you want to have the same API key across all users, you can store the code directly in the source code of the block.
If you want the user to bring their own API key (like we do for the Twilio Send SMS block), you can store the user’s API key in globalConfig, which is a key-value store that’s scoped to that block installation.
Note that in either case, the credentials will be visible to all users of the block, since the API requests are made client-side.
With all the tools available, what types of people do you consider to be developers?
someone who writes a custom block?
someone who writes a script for scripting block?
someone who uses the Standard API?
someone who has an API key and puts it in a 3rd party app but might not write any code directly?
someone with creator permissions on a base?
I’m having some trouble getting some of the examples to install. Where do you suggest going for troubleshooting info on getting started? It can be hard to tell if my issue is an npm issue, a node issue, a react issue, or what. I haven’t worked in react before.
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
Hi @Michelle_Valentine - I have a business question that could help hone in on the types of blocks to build.
What types of teams are ‘power users’ of Airtable? (Either in terms of activity on Airtable or have the largest amount of users within a team using Airtable).
For example:
Do you see generally see many small businesses that use Airtable for one piece of their ‘stack’ (e.g. agencies that use it to track clients and billing).
Or for larger customers, do they use it to replace other services (e.g. using Airtable to track product dev tasks instead of doing it in JIRA).
On that note, do ‘power users’ benefit from integrating Airtable with other existing services (e.g. pulling in information from Salesforce to enrich a customer base in Airtable)
Any help in identifying the types of teams that fit your ideal customer could help narrow down the use case and approach.
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.
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
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.
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.
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. And thank you for helping us on this journey as well by offering solutions to the community. Makes a world of difference.