In modern development and business operations, manual processes are bottlenecks. Manually creating a task for every new user signup, every failed deployment, or every high-priority support ticket is not just tedious—it's inefficient, error-prone, and unscalable. This is where the paradigm of "business as code" becomes a game-changer.
What if your core business events could automatically trigger and assign the necessary work? Imagine a world where your task list manages itself, driven directly by the actions happening within your services.
This is the promise of event-driven automation. By combining the power of serverless functions with an API-first task management system like Tasks.do, you can transform your task management from a manual chore into a fully automated, programmable service.
Treating task creation as an automated response to an event isn't just a novelty; it's a fundamental improvement to your operational workflow.
Building an event-driven task creation system is surprisingly simple. It consists of three core components:
The Event Source: This is the trigger. It can be nearly anything in your tech stack:
The Glue (A Serverless Function): This is the small, stateless piece of code that listens for the event. Hosted on platforms like Vercel, AWS Lambda, or Google Cloud Functions, it receives data from the event source, processes it, and performs an action. It's the perfect "if this, then that" engine.
The Action (The Tasks.do API): This is where the magic happens. The serverless function makes a simple API call to Tasks.do, passing the relevant information from the event to programmatically create a new, perfectly-formed task.
Let's make this concrete. Imagine you want to create a task for your Customer Success team every time a new user signs up for your product.
The Goal: When a new user account is created, automatically generate a task assigned to success-team@example.com with a due date three days from now.
Step 1: The Trigger
Our authentication provider (like Auth0 or Firebase) is configured to send a webhook to a specific URL every time a new user successfully signs up. The webhook's payload includes the user's name and email.
Step 2: The Serverless Function & Tasks.do Integration
We deploy a simple serverless function at the webhook URL. This function will parse the incoming request and use the Tasks.do SDK to create the task.
Here’s what the code for that function could look like in TypeScript:
// Deployed as a serverless function (e.g., /api/webhooks/new-user)
import { tasks } from '@do-sdk/server';
// This handler receives the webhook from our auth provider
export default async function handler(req) {
// In a real-world scenario, you should first validate the webhook signature
// to ensure the request is legitimate.
// Parse the new user data from the request body
const { user } = await req.json();
if (!user || !user.email) {
return new Response('User data is missing.', { status: 400 });
}
// Calculate a due date 3 days from now
const dueDate = new Date(Date.now() + 3 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000)
.toISOString()
.split('T')[0];
try {
// Use the Tasks.do API to create the onboarding task
const newTask = await tasks.create({
title: `Onboard new user: ${user.name || user.email}`,
description: `New user signed up with email: ${user.email}. Reach out to schedule an onboarding call.`,
priority: 'medium',
assignee: 'success-team@example.com',
dueDate: dueDate,
tags: ['onboarding', 'new-user', 'customer-success'],
});
console.log(`Onboarding task created with ID: ${newTask.id}`);
return new Response(JSON.stringify({ success: true, taskId: newTask.id }), { status: 201 });
} catch (error) {
console.error('Failed to create task via Tasks.do API:', error);
return new Response('Error creating task.', { status: 500 });
}
}
That’s it. With this function deployed, your user onboarding workflow is now fully automated. Every single signup instantly becomes an actionable, assigned, and trackable task without anyone lifting a finger.
This pattern can be applied to virtually any process:
By leveraging a flexible a task management API, you are no longer limited by the features of a traditional UI. Your business logic becomes the source of truth for the work that needs to be done.
Ready to stop managing tasks and start engineering your workflows? Tasks.do gives you the simple, powerful API to build the automated systems you need.