I followed this tutorial on how to do mail merge in Google Apps, and it taught me a lot about Javascript and the future for open source applications.

Doing mail merge in Google Apps was a lot of fun!  With a little copy and paste and about 15 minutes, I had was sending emails attached with customized letters as PDF’s.  Could programming always be this easy?

I think so: Javascript is easy, fast, and flexible.  It’s great for implementing single-task automations.  It’s great for copy-paste-customize development.  If we can provide Javascript developers with a domain-friendly API that hides the complex data structures, security requirements, and special code for working with big data, I think we’d have the perfect platform for open community-developed software.