Build an Insanely Simple Data Warehouse using Zapier, Rails, Heroku and SQLBot

For my day job I work as the CEO of Scripted.com, a marketplace of freelance writers that helps companies boost their organic traffic with content marketing.  Yay free traffic!

The prior dev crew there built everything on Mongo, which makes reporting . . . less than fun.  Seriously, punch me in the face.   Quick aside: if you really want to get MongoDB data into a SQL db, check out Xplenty, I've heard they can do it pretty well.

I am huge fan of SQL.  I love it.  I used to dream in it (no joke) when I spent my days writing it.   

We use Slack at Scripted for team communication, so I wanted a crazy easy way to get good reporting into Slack WITHOUT HAVING TO SPEND A BUNCH OF DEVELOPER DOLLARS.

A few caveats:

1. I love rails, and can crank out scaffolding apps quickly
2. I love SQL, and even created SQLBot.co as a testament to that love
3. We built our own Zapier app at Scripted to fire off important business events that we do VERY important stuff with - email, CRM, support, etc.

With all that said, here's what we did:

1. Created a Zapier event to let us know when a customer rated a piece of writing. Using Zapier, this let's us see it immediately in Slack & create a task in our CRM to reach out (we use Pipedrive)
2. I created an ultra simple rails scaffolding app & deployed to Heroku to store the data so we can report on trends, etc. with the awesomeness that is SQL
3. I fired up SQLbot.co to pump in reporting

More on this soon!