My n8n Journey - Ricardo Espinoza

okay awesome yeah i'm gonna thank you for being here today i'm gonna be talking about my journey my nan journey uh i guess i'm gonna start by giving you a little bit of background about me and a software developer from venezuela i've been living in the state for five years specifically in orlando florida uh during my professional career i started working when i began to start working with php then i did a little bit of java and i've been working with a new yeas api for the last i would say four or five years uh i'm currently working as a back-end developer in en however i've done i will say a bit of everything from the docs to a bit of the core developing nodes and helping people on the community okay so let's start okay how everything

started uh i had this habit of checking product home every morning to see what cool pros are out there and i remember on october 8th of 2019 i came across nan i thought it was really cool uh yeah i don't know the project real quick spin it up and then yeah something click on my mind uh i really like it was open source was sustainable and it was no eas that as i mentioned i had experience with so to understand exactly what why nema clicked and how to explain you what i was working on at the time i had created this company with a couple of friends uh called clip uh clip is uh you can cop you i could describe it as a barber barbershop marketplace so if you needed to hear a haircut you could go to the app you know look for barbers around you look for the work they've done the review that people have given to them and you know even pay from the app you prepay your appointment and the service provider had another mobile app where they could you know keep arrange their schedule so keep this in mind what i thought was the only pack and the only developer and my other two friends one of uh was doing the sales and the other one was doing the marketing so while working on clip uh most of my time i was working on an api i was the one that you can see right now can you see it the api yeah we have like more than 100 endpoints so you can imagine that was taking most of my time the only developer here but they did this course you know from

udemy from hero from zero to hero and then they thought that they were email markers now so they wanted to send a lot of emails like every day and the way they do that is they would tell me to put the data from the database uh and they would give me a template and then i would literally go to the database boxes query the data export the csv go to no eas import that file iterate over the file and then consume the mail drink mandrel api rest api in case you don't know what mind release is a matching company that is used to send transactional emails well that started okay i was doing that just a couple of times a day but then they wanted to do like every day and i didn't have time to do that so that's what when i found an ea i thought okay let me try to solve this small issue maybe i can save a couple of hours here so then i came with this brilliant

solution this really complex workflow i don't think you're going to find something complex in this yeah believe it or not this was like the first workflow i wanted to use any that in am4 so my idea was okay i'm gonna use the postgre note which was available at the time i'm gonna do the query there every time i need to pay data which is pretty fast because the data was simple and then i'm gonna just map that data to the template on mandarin using expressions that was fine until you know reality hit me on the face and i realized that there was no mandarin out there so i tried to use the http note which was available at the time but the mandarin uh api is pretty tedious i had to uh input all the template variables manually i didn't want to do that i wanted something that i want to do the node to populate automatically those fields for me so that's why we get here we got here

to my first contribution which was of course the mandrel uh the mandarin note i did it on october 26th of 2019. if you see here you will think that oh he sent it in october and then got a merch it went perfect i thought my note was perfect but then you can see what happened really here so this is me then jan realized send me these small texts a couple of small things that i have missed keep in mind that at this point in time there was i think there was no documentation hold to develop notes or at least not as we have today so i just did what i did was i just went to the code and started looking on other notes and start you know using that as a reference that that didn't go well i started you know back and forth with jen until i kinda figured it out and then even though at the end you still have to make some changes and then merge so yeah i guess i could have stopped here because i didn't need another note at the time but uh i enjoyed that process a lot i mean when you add the node to the workflow to the editor ui and start playing with it i don't know why i just fell in love with that and then i just wanted to keep doing that then i started to look in on the community and start you know creating notes for the community so i will benefit the community and we'll still you know keep having fun so that takes us to what is it next okay when i was there

yeah what kept me going to the you know to always keep developing note the fun of developing as i mentioned already the positive feedback that i was getting for the community you know people was always thankful for the notes that i was creating and yeah with every message that i was getting every time i read that i would just get you know on fire and i just wanted to keep going to keep developing more notes and lastly jams hell he was always like pretty responsive with that without that probably would have to stop and you know leave the project at the moment he was always you know we were at that time we were chatting a lot uh through email and in the community after doing that for a couple of months then one day i i said okay let me check how many notes i have created so that take us here i call it my first

milestone i never set that goal i just started to count and then i realized that i had done more than 50. so i told that to jan did he put this in the community and yeah i guess yeah i never thought i would hit that mark to be honest i had no clue that i had gone that far uh that was as you can see there three months existing day after the first contribution at that moment and at this point in time i was having uh some talks with giant about working for nan to be honest i wasn't completely sure if we i was going to be able to because jan wanted to build he didn't want to build a remote team and i wasn't able to move to berlin but uh well we worked it out and yeah i can tell you that out of the of all the jobs that i have this is the one that i have enjoyed the most um yeah i mean i get to work with doing what i like uh working with the amazing team or really smart people um yeah till this day everything great so far uh in case you are interested in contributing to nan one thing that um i guess people is not completely sure about that they also think that they regularly think that they can use can contribute by developing notes but uh there is um way more than that you can also work on the dots you probably soon gonna be able to help us with the translations i know one of my co-workers ben is working on that you can create how-to videos you can share on the phone on the experiential experiences that you're having with an end you can you know if you know how to do something and someone is asking that on the community you can help the person in the community and you can always you know let us know what is your feedback about the project uh i guess that's it uh in case you didn't believe about the sniping thing this is me uh training to become the best sniper that i can um yeah thank you in case you have any questions let me know by the way if you want to find me in the community this is my username if you see this picture that's