If you are a self-respecting programmer, you should ask yourself if someone has done a better job writing the same tool than you intend to do.

You are using very strong words to describe a very weak signal, and it comes out sounding like noise.

Self-respecting programmers make lots of good and bad decisions, and trying to exclude someone from that category because they went down a particular path is divisive and unproductive.

If you had said, "I don't see why one would opt to use a service rather than write a script for this very simple task," you might've gotten an interesting answer pointing out something you missed.

No self respecting programmer would throw away the chance to learn a valuable lesson to grandstand.

(Edit: Though I've totally made that mistake before.)

You write your little glue code, then you spin up a server to run it periodically (which costs money), then you're forever on the hook for patching, restarting, adding features, dealing with api changes, etc etc etc...

As opposed to "set up, forget about it, have a beer".

You're right, I did have that on my mind when I was posting and was hoping not to catch too much flak! Someone down the thread mentioned keeping things running, debugging, etc. which is part of what kept me from doing it on my own as I have enough small side projects to debug without adding another.

It really began as me trying to find an exercise in seeing what the easiest way to inform someone who is always checking a specific app already, and I had heard of IFTTT but hadn't checked it out or put it to use myself. I think it's interesting that IFTTT has been successful since it seems like the demographic who would think to convert an RSS feed to Facebook posts (and not code it themselves) would be fairly small.

Anyways, setting it up with IFTTT took me less than 15 minutes and has never given me any problems, except when the auth expired (triggering an email from IFTTT) and I had to reauthorize the integration with Facebook. I wonder if I would have had the foresight to set up email notifications with my homegrown solution?

The problem is not the 10 line script. The problem is maintaining it. Adapt it whenever something changes, preferably before it breaks. Keep it running on some server. Monitor that.