Community Hangout February 1st, 2024: 2023 Review & Community Awards

so first of Welcome this is very exciting there's a lot of people I see we're 34 already so I think we're it's going to be a big one that's amazing it's really great to see so many people I know a lot of names already I haven't seen a lot of your faces so that's really cool to see who's behind the username um for me I've been uh in our community around two years and I just recently joined n0 as Community manager um and I know that it's been quite a while since we had our last user Meetup about two years uh when Hari was still with us um and a lot of you told me how much you missed doing these events so we really wanted to restart them and make it more regular and like start seeing you guys again and learn what you want and what you need um but yeah so uh we're back um today I'm G to be talking with Yan our founder and uh Fearless lead leader about our achievements in the last year um we'll have the community Awards it's a new thing I'll tell you a bit about that later um and we'll take a peek into the coming year to see what our priorities are going to be and what we'll be focusing on so um the uh agenda for today is going to be uh looking at the Milestones of the last

year Community Awards plans for next year and then we close off with the Q& A session any questions that you have now please drop them in the chat here in Zoom uh and one of our team members will keep an eye on it and collect all the questions and we'll come back to it later at the end of this meeting um if we don't have time to answer you today we'll make sure to make a note and get back to you later um so with that said um I'm gonna give the word to uh Yan and talk about what we did last year away y thank you much bar and also

thanks again everybody for joining us again great to see some familiar faces and read some familiar names because nor don't see the faces as but pointed out um happy to share a little bit things we achieved last year and we actually got quite a lot of stuff done um there was obviously a large focus on AI like this was this huge thing that obviously kind of unfolded everywhere and obviously also changed some stuff for us um in the NN case like we have kind of this kind of twofold um focus around AI one we call AI for NN the other one n for AI meaning AI for Ed n is what we mean there is It's Kind of um AI assisted workflow building where we launched there last year was this aski functionality in the code node that kind of helps you to do data Transformations you can test it on the cloud obviously we need an um open AI token that's why it's only available on cloud um but it makes the life especially for people that are not as confident in coding as others much easier um the other thing we launched um more towards the end of the year was our Ed end for AI functionality like very we where you can use Ed end to build um AI powered applications like we actually very excited to what we built there um where we integrated D chain into NN pretty confident saying we probably offer right now one of the easiest and best um building experiences um in the market I would say because we were very lucky that we could build on top of everything we obviously built the last years of all like you obviously invested quite some resource in building a great um ux for our users and I think all of that paid off very well um into the functionality released also important to mention is like we for example also just recently released the chat trigger note which makes it now super easy to build chat bots so you should definitely check it out um it's also um quite um for the people that actually don't know what I'm talking about it's um probably helpful to check out um what our community members did um on the next slide um especially like what marel did like he won our AI Lang chain contest last year like there you can find this amazing template you can see right um on the slide on our web page maybe you can also actually link to it um probably in the YouTube comments or here in the comments um add also um what what Derek did um regarding our um telegram chatbot um template actually um he did not just create a great template he also created a whole YouTube video series around um it as well so definitely check it out uh another thing we kind of re-released last year again was our creator Hub like the actually from the first day people were able to share workflows um like in end workf with the community at some point it kind of did fall a bit in disarray and we actually took it down more less half um but now we really start double down it again we created a lot more templates um also with the help of the community we really try to make sure they're as helpful as possible and as well documented as possible it's also like much easier now that we finally um allow people to have like this the sticky notes I think like we really have now created a lot of create templates and we definitely going to create a lot of them um this year as well so for new people also for people that always use and end for quite a while it's definitely worth checking out all the great templates that have been created there because it really makes it super easy to to get started and also like with some functionality we just created around making it easier to to use the existing credentials and update all the notes there it really improved the experience a lot also important to mention is like um we also just relaunching our affiliate program um actually we had it but we are kind of improving experience there and change to a new vendor that is more dependable and better like all people that can create and that create um templates they can link they can use the affiliate um link to the to the templates to also actually earn money with it Al there some people also having some quite great experience there and I think are starting to earn money there as well um so um on the other side what we also focused a lot last year is on the Enterprise s side um you can see um actually no we start with the general improvements first sorry yeah like General improvements was like a big milestone was obviously our 1. 0 release it's like that we used a chance to make some breaking changes that we thought are important for the future NN to make sure we have this stable product where we where people know what they can expect like where we could add semantic versioning could deprecate things that um didn't make sense anymore we also added a lot of other functionality that is for example makes it now much easier to rerun past executions um other important functionality that has been requested a lot the last years from the community have been like error outputs you can now very easily um root all the items that fail on a separate output you can find in the settings virtual history it is also available on cloud um where you can um very easily roll back to past versions of the workflow we kind of improved added like this kind of context menu for the nodes um where you can also very clearly see like um the keyboard shortcuts we added dark mode which was one of the most requested features probably um by our users and also we added a 2fa which is obviously very important um for security and securing MN as we obviously store a lot of sensitive information and their security is very important there as just mentioned before it's like on the Enterprise side we invested quite some resources there um meaning like important on is again signal sign on especially important for organizations um to make sure that only the right people have access and make it very easy to get access to NN lock streaming they can make sure the locks actually not just end up somewhere on your server they actually get streams somewhere where you can easily monitor them version history again as um as mentioned before um but there's actually more around um yeah actually there you get the same functionality but you can kind of go back further you also invested more resources regarding collaboration um and for example also canot see when other people work at the same time in the workflow as you're working on it we investing also quite some more resources this year as well and also another important one is different environments where you can have different end deployments um you can historically it was always a problem that if you buy exent press save your workflow goes directly in production and this OB the most time not what you want now you're able to have different and atend instances one for staging for example or Def and another one for production you can test everything in one instance and then push it very easily bya git to this production instance as well um other important changes um have been around the notes on the next slide we tried to overhaul more or less all the core notes they obviously most used notes inside of NN um that includes notes like the HTP request node the set node the if node split in batches which is now the loop node um switch node where we can for example also have now as many outputs as you want the all the file nodes we split up the list item notes date and time database notes like postm myl all of them have been um improved and there are still some other ones we have in the pipeline for this years as well for this year as well we added a form trigger Noe which makes it super easy to get information U from from users in also now in the weight node available so you can have this human in the loop the added pagination it was honestly previous really a pain to paginate um with n ATN unless you had like this built in notes so now this a huge Improvement they made it much simpler and also very much requested feature was adding python support to the code note which has been released as well and guess it was it that was that Tim thank you guys as I said before if you have any questions for y or for me leave them in the chat and we'll get back to it at the end of this meeting um I think you just mentioned that some sometimes things are a pain to use and one of the things I really like is that as a company we use NN a lot internally right and so if you feel the pain of something we feel it as well and we typically are very motivated to fix those things quickly if we can um right

so for the community Awards this is a new thing so it needs to a little bit of explanation I think why we do this um obviously we have a big Community it's growing a lot every year um and what I've seen inside NN is that it's not just the thing we do but it's the thing we live and breathe and the community is really part of the company's DNA and everywhere I look people are aware of what's going on the Forum what's going on social media what you guys are building Etc um people know community members by name and they can tell stories about their Journey so far uh and I think that is really powerful and it also shows me that it's something that we need to celebrate a bit more we need to highlight the contributions that you guys make and so for this year what we've done is we have looked at four different categories of uh of content of contributions that were made um and we handpicked uh community members in each of them based on what they how already helped us last year and unfortunately this funny video is just hidden so I'm just going to move it because I like it so much um right so um we're going to be looking at uh developers who contributed Community nodes um that you can use in your own projects we're looking at template creators um are that are part of the new Creator Hub that Yan mentioned earlier uh we identified uh promoters who helped uh get the word out on social media on link LS in on uh Twitter and on uh YouTube and finally at supporters people who are helping other users on our forums and the first category um oh before I say that I always forget the winners like the people that I nominate that I mentioned here they will all receive a fancy Forum bed so you get Eternal Fame but you also get a cool t-shirt and we made these little booklets for you guys we call them notebooks not notebooks obviously um and so you'll all receive one of these um and I'll contact all of you early next week with information on how to get your prizes as soon as possible so without further Ado the note builders for this year um I would like to congratulate Valentina lilova and Brum canver I hope um for their work uh Valentina uh works for a German agency called digital boss and she has shared uh over 17 noes this year some of the highlights that I looked at were uh a note to work directly with Oracle databases which was not part of our offering yet um and one to connect with Google Firebase to send notifications which is great because that allows you to send free notifications on the internet Brum is an independent consultant from the Netherlands um and aside from Consulting he is basically everywhere in our community so I cannot open the Forum or Discord without running into Brum so that's really awesome and Brum contributed a couple of interesting packages like uh money bird and exoct which are very well-known Financial uh apps here in the Netherlands at least um as well as a pgp encryption node as well so Valentina and R I don't know if you are around feel free to unmute and say hi for a second thank you very much you're welcome sor I had to uh find the button that's okay it's great that you're here thank you okay um then next category is the template creators and one caveat here as joh mentioned we have just properly restarted this so we didn't have uh a ton of data to work with but two people definitely stood out from the crowds they are and I'm going to butcher this name Anka eska just call them um and Luc Lucas perit um nushka created an amazing telegram bot to handle a ticketing system live chat and user management it does everything it's quite wild if you follow that link you'll find it um and they also contributed a library of workflows to allow you to work with cloudflare key value databases so you have a very easy way to store simple bits of data for your workflows Lucas is more on the business side he did for example a script that monitors business reviews so it can keep an eye on certain web pages and alert you when something is up um and he also offers a cheap way of collecting Google Maps data using an external API so that was an interesting application I thought um nushka and Lucas are you around by any chance no well we'll check in with you guys later then for our Advocates I have found Lucas is on this again he does multiple things um I had the pleasure of working with Oscar over the last couple of weeks um when I was collecting tutorials he creates really well produced and Slick short tutorials about working with N1 um and I found that I really enjoyed uh viewing them Oscar also helped beta test our new Advanced AI nodes and he published a review of them on the day that we launched them and those things have been immensely helpful for us um when I talk about tutorials that's something I'll come back to later as well we have a couple of plans in the pipeline for that and Oscar has been helping me with it as well Lucas um is a growth manager and as such he writes he knows how to promote stuff and he does a really good job at on LinkedIn um he has a large follower base and he's been building workflows based on sales Ops and Revenue new OP use cases and so for example he's doing data enrichment data scraping Etc he also posted several product comparisons and use cases that really helped us reach a larger audience in his segment so that was amazing and then there's Maxim pson um he likes to call himself a growth and automation nerd I think that's something that resonates with a lot of people here so that's great um and Maxim likes to post on no code custom AI work and he introd uced a lot of people to the possibilities of N and Lang chain and that was fantastic for us as well so thanks guys this was really cool if any of you is around please unmute and say hi to us oh yeah so I'm here uh so yeah thank you very much for featuring me it's uh it's really great you know to uh work with an Community I personally believe the n10 community is the best in the world so uh I hope to create new tutorials and yeah see you all soon on my YouTube channel thanks Oscar really great to see you then okay and then I am moving to the supporters category two people in this category so I have ehor and Nico um ehor is from Canada and I see him on the Forum almost every day um and the same is true for Nico and the thing is the these two gentlemen they often beat our own support champion John to answering questions and I think that's not a small thing to do like John is very active so if you answer something before him that is amazing um I had the pleasure of ehor answering some of my own questions so that was really cool um Nico uh is also offering n10 consultant and mentoring and I then mentoring sounds like people need some like mental help using it so I'm really curious what that means um but yeah guys your help is amazing and it really helps other users get uh get support a lot faster as well so that is super cool and if any of you is around here please unmute and say hi no okay well then to recap um and again my thing is over it to recap thanks a lot for everyone uh I'll be in touch with you early next week we're still tweaking the booklet a little bit Etc and I'll send you an email with a voucher so you can get your hands on our uh on our prizes and uh with that out of the way we are at our next agenda point which is the plans for 2024 and this is something that J and I are gonna tackle together because we're going to be looking at General things and then at Community things so y you can starts yeah first also want say thank you to all the people that won I think you already make a really huge difference it's really great to see how much time you all invest there to help NN and especially all the community so thanks a lot it's really great and appreciate it but get to the 24 2024 plans um like last year we have seen a lot of growth like both an adoption um but also like regarding um like adoption in the sense of like how many organizations are using us or Al in the cloud so also the revenues means we made a big step in regarding sustainability and so obviously making sure that in it and stays around long term and so we can continuously put on like a lot of resources into the product and provide hopefully amazing support which is apparently um sometimes not even needed because we have so great community members that help out there but obviously we always want to make sure there is enough people there to help out when our community doesn't have time um and obviously that allows us gives us a little bit more flexibility and now we can finally start to grow again like we have planned to grow the team by 50% this year so obviously put in allows us to put in more resources again in products support and in community and as we obviously always love to hire from the community like one of the first people we actually hired was Ricardo who was like think he created like 60 notes by himself before he got hired just for fun and then John who was similar to the people you just mentioned now his main goal was to answer fast in our community people and obviously in our B so please make sure to look through our drop page and apply if there's something that fits your interest um another thing it's important to mention is like we definitely feel the pain and actually it pains me to say it's like recently there have been like the quality suffered in in some cases I think that is like some bucks creeped up and we not as fast as we wanted to in getting rid of them mean like if you obvious create a lot of new things that they introduce new bucks and also other old things that had still bucks there they are at the same time and think we definitely have to step up our game and in improving the quality again there and making sure everybody has a great EXP experience there also around reliability so we going to put a lot of resources this year in making sure at end like it doesn't have bus it is reliable and people have the best experience possible by also improving their usability a lot this going to be a big Focus especially on this the first quarter but probably over the whole year because I think it's something that's going to be very important long term another big thing is obviously still AI as I mentioned before like there going to be a bigger and bigger Focus area for us we simply see a huge opportunity generally especially also for NN this where we also going to double down on both things again for NN AI for NN and n for AI so we have planned on the AI for NN side is like we add things like AI co-pilot functional AI support with errors so meaning like if you can see an error message um for example from an API returns an error like you can directly help people and dis them exactly what is probably wrong and how they can fix it um we want to make it possible that um Ai autofills and creates um HTTP request noes so you can just say create a lead in I tool X then it will figure everything out it's necessary and create a node and then it saves people to do the research um the API docs themselves and just then generally speeds up the development process on the other side for Ed end for AI like there we going to overhaul the open ey node which is actually by now one of the most used nodes in N um and generally like on the we going to improve continuously put a lot of resources in the in our AI like that we built with length chain to improve the gener experience adding more support for more services and just trying to stay up to date and keep on innovating in that area because it's moving so fast and there we going to hire dedicated team around that to make sure we can stay up to date there and going to become one of the hopefully driving forces in that area and now over to Bart the community thanks yeah um so yeah on the topic of Hangouts as I mentioned we want to make sure this is going to be a recurring thing so we're aiming at having an hangout at the end of every month from now on um and this was a bit of a special one because we did the review Etc but coming Hangouts we want to involve the community more as well so as we did in the past we'll be sure to invite speakers from the community will invite other team members to speak about what they're working on inside N1 um we'll try to include things like tutorials Etc so if you are interested in helping out with that uh like being part of these presentations just let me know uh I'll share my email address at the end of this hangout so you can just reach out to me directly and we'll get you set up to work with us also we realized we don't have a great way of sharing any news with you guys so unless you are very closely watching The Forum or our blog you might miss interesting stuff so we'll we're bringing a community newsletter uh to you um and we're currently working on designing that and setting up the system behind it so um hopefully within one or two months we'll be able to share that with you as well and then another thing that I keep hearing all the time is how much people love codons or hackathons or however you want to call them and I think this is something that we could do uh more frequently uh it generates a lot of fun a lot of useful results a lot of great interactions between us and you as well um so yeah that's something I'm definitely interested in um other than that if there's anything you think this community is missing or something you would like to see more of just like let me know I may not be able to do it right away but I'm definitely interested in hearing what you would love to see more of or help with right if you're like volunteering I'm all yours um so yeah I think that is it for us Yan and it's time to head over to the Q& A section which is the more boring slide of them because there's nothing on it this is the one that you guys are going to fill and so I'm going to take a

look at the notes here to see what people asked uh Lucas pin says I'm building an AI workflow Builder is that what you worked or more the code aspects sorry what was it he says I'm building an AI workflow Builder Okay that what you worked on or more the code aspects maybe actually work on both if it is like correctly like we have like I said we have this this two different areas where some for some we use AI to for example help people to build workflows and in the longterm allow PE um have plan that you can just enter some prompt and it builds out um at least part of the workflow the whole workflow for you is that what you mean that that's how I read it yeah so right now we have ask and AI only in the code note but not yet for generating workflow right correct me if I'm wrong is that what you're what you meant okay maybe he can't speak right now yeah he say yes on the chat all right okay yeah all right um and can you elaborate a little bit on those plans John is that the yeah um like I said we will probably start with um something like with for example what you have in GitHub is like it doesn't they have like this kind of co-pilot functionality where it doesn't why out a whole program for you it kind of gives you the next steps and this where we also it's a big opportunity for n at end like says like we created node X and then I probably want to create node y um you probably want to connect it in a certain way and then speed up the process you're still not sure how helpful this and it then builds the whole workflow for you going to be for the simple reason that it's and is like it's easier for something like where we have like B tools that connect a to B because then you can very easily figure out what's happening and people build very complex workflows that are very large it's the same like again if you if AI writes code for you then you have to spend a lot of time figuring out like what did the AI create here does it actually do what I wanted to do is like reading code somebody else wrote for you and it's the same if and if the AI will create a huge workflow because then you have to figure out like how is it connected how does it work um and that is and then you don't like figuring that stuff out is sometimes easy sometimes easier if you just build it yourself that's why we think like probably the step byep process is probably more helpful for people than the whole building that makes sense I have trouble reading my own workflow sometimes I can only imagine if an AI generates it yeah think it's just creating this huge 30 note workflow and then just figing that stuff out is really hard and yeah that's why I think if you step by step I can definitely see L more value there that's what I really like when I look at the Creator Hub on how people build like how professionals build their workflows how they use a lot of sticky notes to like limits or document what parts of workflow are doing exactly but that's I think the next thing is like if you take a workflow that somebody built you know that the person probably thought it through again they documented it they thought about edge cases when the AI is creating something like that that's a huge black box and probably I would not have thought about the edge cases because yeah it's not there yet that's why yeah I think it's a very different experience template building it all right thanks um Lucas has a follow-up question he says is the AI for n8n in the code node coming to be available in selfhosted plans obviously using your own API key I think it should already be available I think it's just probably not properly documented so like I think it was asking the Forum before I hope we properly answer the question if not please um send it to us that we proberly document how it's possible but in the end like the functionality is normally in the code like everything else it's not behind the paid flag it's available for everybody it has to be configured correctly so I'm not sure what has to be enabled to set it maybe it's just an environment variable where you can Define the open AI note or the open AI um token but I think it shouldn't be very complicated so it should be available for everybody if we know how and I hope we have the documented somewhere nice okay yeah we'll uh we'll make a note to look into that as well um okay next question is by shaunas and they ask really missing hang on let me first read this because it's a long one really missing open AI updates to use it in the full latest scope uploading documents and stuff without making any extra HTTP requests with open AI API but all other AI Lang chain stuff just saves Millions hours of work huge thanks so I think you already refer to last needing to do more work on the open AI node right yeah and I get T the open ey note we have right now is the one I created at some point as it came out it's def probably the most perfect note especially with other stuff we learned recently that's why we currently doing um relaunching it and making yeah updates to it because it's Again by now it's one of the most important notes we have definitely going to improve further and hopefully new functionality will be added as well if there's currently something important with same all right thanks uh Simon AKA shiroi asks how often do you plan to make Community meetups from now on well I already answer that like every month they all as well um so we should be back at the end of the month early or early March asan will the slides presented today be made public um yeah I have no problem with that so um I will not be able to publish the video before the weekend uh but I'll do it U on Monday and I'll put a post on the Forum and add the slides to that as well so you can read everything there at your ledure um a follow-up question from Lucas uh and he asks I have nearly finished creating a workflow magic positioning API would that be useful or is it planned umic positioning like position the noes and I'm not cleaning up the layout Lucas can you comment on that yes finally I can speak of it hey magic positioning would be I'm not sure if you're familiar with what make uh does well it's obviously less good than an 18 I love it so much but they have this one little thing that was so cool is a button where you click it and it just positions the whole workflow but in a there is loops and stuff so I did it myself I have a bit of JavaScript to write still but I'm not sure if you're if you've worked on it or anything no definitely didn't work on it I think definitely would be helpful yeah I think it's has been mentioned the past to share it yeah I it needs to be done but it works for the L chain for uh straight lines but it has some problems with multiple connections everywhere so I think it's not a simple problem to fix yeah I think exactly I thought about it for two weeks Non-Stop and just worked hardcore really amazing yeah please share it's coming out need some in the case of make it's it's an easier problem right because everything B very cool I do miss that function so that's good call um all right um and uh Lucas you had one more question uh so stay on the line if you want uh a cool open AI functionality would be to insert messages in a variable instead of having fixed roles that need to be set in the interface manually I'm not sure what that is oh it wasn't a question it was more like a request I'm planning to create a function request a functionality request but that was more a comment because in the open a I know you need to set like for example the system prompt and then tell it take this variable but I have huge well I need to do some weird tricks and go through the API the API HTTP node instead because I sometimes you need to put those messages in a different order or with new roles more messages Etc would you please post it to the form as a future request and Market this also with open AI can it's yep it's an open tab I'm reading it okay perfect thanks yeah because like I said when we now redo that note it would definitely be good if he can consider that okay for sure thank you good timing then yeah um all right last question that I see here by uh ran yanin he asks would it be a good idea to create a guide on how to create nodes for NN some YouTube series would be very helpful I do think we have material for that but maybe we can yeah I think it's documented in the docs we also have a YouTube video but the YouTube video is to very old and also T there currently two ways to create a note like you can use the old like a programmatic style like you can use either you can write code or like we have all kind of this Jason style to do it and like for the Jason side I think there's no YouTube video yet and I'm not sure how it looks like regarding docs I think it's documented I'm not sure how deeply again like the video we have for this probably two years old something like that so agree that it's probably something where we should put again more resources in um as it's just so helpful especially as we now want that more and more community members obiously create more notes better documentation is always helpful and it's also something where we want to put more resources in like right now we have de and she's amazing and she's taking care about the dogs by herself and it's also something where we want to put um more resources behind and this year to hire somebody else to get more support there and make the dogs even better this will hopefully enable us to also improve the dogs for not they would open this well it's a hard problem because the product changes so fast we have so many things to maintain it's uh the problem with videos always yeah like you create a video and it's great videos especially wait two weeks and then not a great anymore yeah CA at some point more problems than it's helping because it's just confusing people all right thanks um next question is kind of related is by B uh and they ask was course the course level two improved lately I remember it being unclear actually that's on my plate now so I'll be working on that in the next couple of weeks if you have anything that is like specific if you have any specific questions do reach out to me and let me know and I'll make sure we solve that real soon as well my email address will be on the next slide so I can answer this um and as also important to mention you want to create much more content also on the V side um to like I think Ed education is very important especially like a product like ours think obviously being very powerful that's great but also yeah doesn't make it always the easiest product to use like we can try obviously very hard but creating something easy is it's not easy it's a very hard problem and that's why especially documentation is very important and again vs is another thing so we definitely more tutorials more Vos better documentation is definitely something we want to invest more resources on all right with that um we are done with the Q& A I did notice Lucas peret just joined and Lucas um we mentioned you I'm going to scroll back in our slides just for a second um so you were winner in not one but two categories of our community Awards we are uh recognizing you as one of our most active template creators uh and we talked about a few of your uh projects there and we also recognized you as one of our most active promoters our Advocate um and we mentioned the work that you're doing so if you want you can unmute and say a couple of words uh we have a couple of cool prizes for you like our little notebook that will come be coming your way soon um and we're really happy with your help maybe they can't speak now um with the questions out of the way that's W that's all we have to say for now um after this slide I'll stop screen sharing and we can be on screen and just like a bit of a social chat if you guys want um I really enjoyed this uh I'm glad we're going to be doing this more often and uh I'm very happy that you joined us today um if you need to email me you can contact me at Bart nn. iio um or I'll be on the Forum as well as B Fe so you can send me a DM there if you