Build Like a Farmer - Jason McFeetors

so today i'm going to talk a little bit about uh naden a little bit of an introduction to it for you uh through a project that i've been working on and um i've made my little presentation built like a farmer so uh for those of you who know me and uh know a little bit about my background i grew up on the farm i'm from rural manitoba canada and so unlike a lot of people um i spent my days on the fields on the tractor um milking cows feeding chickens that type of thing which is often an unusual thing nowadays where so many people grew up in the city so i like to have a lot of my philosophy comes from what i've learned on the farm so maybe a little bit of a background into me other than just the fact that i grew up in the farm uh who am i so uh there's a lot of terms here that people have used to describe me um i've got a background in all kinds of technologies and all kinds of different things really when it comes down to it all is i'm just a tech nerd i love technology i love working with different things hardware software i like to build stuff i've got a nice build area i've kind of built up over the years and so i like to get my hands dirty and because of that i think i've exposed myself to a lot of different technologies and processes over the years that lets me kind of tie different things together that other people might not have thought of in the beginning so build like a farmer how do you do that

growing up on the prairies i initially felt that farm i was missing out that there was a lot of different experiences i wasn't having things that i couldn't do simply because i was stuck there on the farm you know when the people were going and doing things um in the cities learning all this different tech and stuff i was stuck there you know digging in the dirt and uh you know figuring out how to make sure that everything works properly but later on i've discovered that there's a lot of those experiences were actually critical into how i think now and that have really been a basis to any success that i've had in technology or life in general so there's four things that i follow on a very regular basis and i did that with this little project i'm going to be showing you that they built n8n so the first principle that i use is the fact that

abundance can be the enemy of innovation if we always have things at our hands and we always have different options available to us quite often we'll give up too soon and we don't actually dig into what the problem is and solve it we just throw it aside and start over so i think when we force ourselves into something that is a little bit smaller a little bit tighter we can get a lot more out of it and become a lot more knowledgeable in the process the second principle that i like to use

is you use the right tool for the right job this is something my dad really instilled me he said that if you've got the right tool available to you use it don't be lazy you've set it up right you use it properly and get it all working the way it should be but there's a corollary to that if you don't have the right tool you make the right tool and that's one of the beautiful things i like about naden is that if you don't have a node to do something it's okay chances are if you're working with an api the http request node will do for you what you need so you can actually build out from there with the base tools what you need to get done and it allows you to kind of move ahead with those tools

and then the last principle is you always need to be willing to help your neighbor this is one of the things that really attracted me to naden is the fact that this was not a product that was being built by some big corporation to add to its bottom line coffers it was being done as a passion project uh that you know as jan had mentioned you know he started this out on his own wanted to grow it out and make it available to other people and uh simply because of that i think it's important that we also give back and so the tool that i'm going to be showing you here in a moment um i'm going to be making available and at the end of the presentation anybody can grab that tool use it for themselves no cost if you need help reach out glad to help out and make it work for what you needed to do so this uh mysterious tool that i've been talking about is uh a newsletter signup workflow so i'm gonna bring that up on the screen here and if i can find it on my screen there it is so i spent a little bit of time over the last um well this has actually been a work in progress for quite a while uh this is the third generation of this workflow tool that i've created and what this does is it allows you to uh give people a url they can then use that url to see a web page they can sign up to the webpage it saves the people's information in a grid on a tool called base row and then uh from there it will send them an email where they can click on the registration to confirm that their email is a uh legitimate email so this is something we've all done a thousand times you sign up for something that's a process you use and there's usually a bunch of different systems in behind the scenes this does the whole thing right from the workflow that you see the only other component other than this workflow is uh base row itself which i initially wasn't going to use base 0 i was initially going to actually store all the information locally in a json file but i wanted to use base row just to show you that you don't necessarily need a base row node in order to get access to the stuff so there's three parts as you can see to this so there's the there's three web hooks there's the sign up web hook the submit web hook and the confirm web hook the sign up web hook and in combination with the html form and the create form file uh node these three nodes will actually create the web page dynamically um so that it basically turns ended in into a web server so we can go to that page so here's a link to sign signup page so this web page that you see here was written and created 100 percent in naden this does not access any external files doesn't pull anything from any other web page the graphic is actually embedded in the html and the whole thing can be done again without having to worry about whether or not you've got a web server running or any other services and just like a typical web service you can fill it in and when you hit submit this actually fires up the second workflow so this workflow here just got fired off so what this does is it pulls the values that were submitted it then takes that um uh the new subscriber and adds it into the grid and there's the information that i just entered in so this is in base row so it put this information in and created this guide and we'll see that now i just have email come in and as soon as this pulls up there's the email that was automatically sent by the workflow and you'll notice this guide here is part of the url that has been sent out so it connects for me the email address and that guide so that you can actually tell that this is the right person so when i click on it this actually fires up the third workflow which confirms that yep we've got your registration your email has been confirmed and in grid we now have the confirm check mark so once again all of that was handled by all of these three workflows this is a relatively simple uh setup this took me i think all toll just building the whole thing up probably took me just to fine tune it and everything because the web pages took the most fine tuning maybe two and a half three hours and it's completely self-sufficient so i don't need a web server i don't need to worry about other services yes i use grid but easy enough for me to take this these two grid nodes that i'm calling them grid nodes but they're actually http request nodes take those two nodes and replace them with a file write and read so save all that information locally so as you can see very powerful the reason i wanted to do something like this because um i was on a call a couple days ago with somebody and they referred to any n as middleware and to be frank that's kind of where i started out because i was looking at anything as a tool to connect a to b and we quite often use it as such but um i think this goes to show that it can be much more than that you know people often say well where's the form node where do i create a form to input stuff you don't have to you use html and spit out the forms right then and there and the nice thing about this is that you can actually turn these into workflows that you use over and over again and just call the workflows back so that you push some html to it and it spits it all out and these can become reusable over time anyway that's kind of what i've got um i'm open to questions kenny i'm going to hand it back over to you