At Glitch we're a distributed workforce. This is a story of connecting between departments and across the country. And using our own product (Glitch) and one of our fav business tools (Trello) to create a useful automation.

Last month, we launched Glimmer, our new digital magazine. A common problem for editors is managing pitches. Often this involves wading through a messy shared inbox. When Glimmer editor Margarita Noriega wanted a better way, she reached out on Slack. And Johnnicholas responded. The collaboration puts all those pitches on a shared (and well-organized Trello board). - Melissa McEwen, Editor of Glitch @ Dev

It started with Slack

Margarita posted in #ask (Glitch's internal channel for asking questions of anyone and everyone who is paying attention to #ask at the moment):

Has anyone ever played around with submitted forms and Trello? Thinking about a Glitch app that's attached to an Airtable that's attached to creating a card on a Trello board (which might then ping a Slack channel). This could also be a Google Form, but the form itself should be for public use (and not hold any private user info). A use case for this might be, "fill out this form" (that's hosted in a Glitch app, connected to an Airtable/Google Sheet/other such thing that private hosts the submitted information), and once the form is submitted, it would create a Trello card.

Anil, our CEO, responded:

I think there may be a glitch app that just directly creates a Trello card. (if not, there should be!)

I thought that this was a good example of a small single-purpose website that has a frontend (where the description of what pitching to Glimmer is, and the form) and a backend (where the details about how to access Margarita's Trello board would stay). This which showcases Glitch's one of strengths, websites that have backends, and I had an example of something that seemed similar in my back pocket (~courageous-ox), which I was eager to adapt to her purposes.

Making it happen

It is not entirely obvious, if you are thinking about making something, a starting point would be helpful. In this case, ~courageous-ox was a SQLite-database-backed website that took some information from the user and stored it away; the plan was to make a Trello-backed website that took some information from the user and stored it in Trello.

How Glitch uses Glitch

This is one of the many ways that Glitch uses Glitch (and Slack and Trello) - to support collaboration between people that might be distant from one another in the org chart. These short-and-sweet projects make working at Glitch better. Since we developed the Glitch project together, if and when something kinda-sorta-similar comes up, both I and Margarita have a new capability - we can remix ~pitch-glimmer and adjust it to the new circumstance.

Feel free to remix ~pitch-glimmer yourself - you could add your Trello API details to turn it into your own app, and remember that the kinda-sorta-similar can stretch pretty far!