I love simple basic things that come together to deliver a feature.

I am working on a new product around guided meditation. I am learning what makes a good meditation session and applying it to create lot of sessions on the fly. While the hardware is coming together at its own pace and has its own challenges (maybe I will write a separate post around it), I wanted a quick way to share these sessions with the right people and collect their comments and feedback.

My requirements were clear: clean UX that allows users to tell us their name and what they thought of the session. For users, I didn't want them to create account, authenticate etc. For backend I didn't want to over-engineer it. A central place where I can see all the comments, a notification when I get a new feedback.

Enter: Google Forms. When I first read about it from Claude and Stackoverflow I didn't believe it. Their whole setting up authentication, configuration is PAIN. They would never allow a simple POST to register a response. But they do. Here are the steps:

1. Create a google form with the questions
2. Publish it and get the public URL
3. Use a tool to get "entries" that represents your questions
4. Use a simple POST (requests or fetch) request with all entries (fields) and your values and that's it.
5. Enable email notification for new responses

That's it. I now get neat breakdown of the feedback on google forms response section and I have a google spreadsheet where I have all the comments and I can share with others too.