Community Meetup April 9th, 2021: Fair-code, Intro to n8n, Lightning talks

so yeah hey everyone thank you so much for joining us um i'm tane your host for today and i'm really excited to kick off the first m810 meetup so i'm joining in from berlin and i know we have a very international audience and speaker lineup so i'd love to know where you joining us from today so please say hi and share in the chat cool so if you haven't had the chance to take a look at the agenda yet we have five speakers who will be joining us today so first of all we have a session by our founder and ceo jan oberhauser joining us from bavaria to talk about fear code and why he decided to start it after that we'll have a short q and a session please send in any questions that you have um or in case if you uh face any technical issues in the chat and we'll get that sorted right away we'll then be joined by jason who is joining in from canada today who will give us an introduction to nathan and i got a peek at this demo it's really cool so looking forward to that as well we will then have another q a round after which we'll have three lightning talks so we're joined by richard from portugal demo from france and mikhail from spain so they'll be sharing their experience with n810 and all the cool stuff that they have been working on and at the end we have office hours so in case if you have any questions about na10 your workflows your use cases feel free to stick around and we'll answer them so let's get started by welcoming yarn over hauser so yum over to you okay now okay uh first uh thanks

everybody for joining really cool to see so many faces all around the world and there's so many participants in general um i like can i said i'm the founder of c uh and ceo of ntn and i talk a little bit today about fair codes why i uh i get started and i kind of talk a fair bit today also about the origin because i think it's important to understand why it gets started to really understand why it exists and why it's important that it exists so first of all the background like um i in the beginning of uh no it was the end of 2019 i had worked like one and a half years on edit and part-time um that means the progress was very slow because they are obviously that it worked just part-time and they had another job another startup to actually earn some money and but i wanted to make sure to at some point build a commercially viable product that i can spend my full time working on and still support my family at the same time so i thought about different alternatives for me it was clear i kind of wanted to open source and it and because i really want to make sure that everybody can use the product for free they want to make sure that everybody can adopt it but i also knew that if i gonna do that the chance is very high that i gonna release the code somebody else probably gonna take the code package it up offer it host it somewhere and they're gonna charge money for that and i probably gonna be stuck to kind of keep on building the product going to support their users going to fix bugs and do anything like that especially didn't they have a problem with having to support um still having to support the people but in the end i still have to compete with my own products so i was looking for an alternative how i can avoid that to build a sustainable business but still have it available for free so then i found the commons clause you can add that one to any kind of open source license and then we added it to apache tool which kind of which took away a right to commercialize the source code that was exactly what they wanted that means people could still use it for free but if they want to commercialize the code or want to earn money with it they have to together a specific license from me at that point now from ending but that change meant that and it was not um open source anymore it wasn't always approved open source anymore and because of that that's why all the problems started the reason why i had so many problems was that i decided to still call it open source in quotes because there was no other term for that meaning there were there's only open source in that open source there was like nothing in between meaning even though you could still do less than or less the same thing than with open source which is the most important thing for 99 of the people you can use it for free you can extend it and so on i also doesn't like if you use the term but again i i still chose it because for me it was clear that's the clearest to the to transportate the meaning of what people can do with the code of anything um so and after launched that was okay for a little while but after a few hours somebody posted on the community forum that i'm guest lighting people at the same time that people that the same person some other people post and heck and use um yeah that's it's not open source it should take it uh down and so on what they proposed was this they should call it source available the problem is also available is that it means exactly that meaning that the source code is available but you maybe cannot even use it meaning an mrt license product is also available um any kind of proprietary source you put online without the license also source available and even if you cannot use it so meaning it i didn't really see a reason to use a term if it doesn't really have any meaning at all so i then talked with some people as the president of the oc reached out and we tried to find a solution at least i proposed that they could for example implement some kind of level system like they still have the regular open source that is exactly what they had how to define it right now but for example have like a level two where they where people could take away like additional rights like level two would be take away the criminalization rights level three something else even though there was a very nice conversation with him and he was a great guy he didn't really warm up to ideas very much so meaning he couldn't find the solution there um so but i didn't really want to give up like i did i saw that it happened something similar what happened to me happened to a lot of people before meaning it was a problem that is going to stay around if it's not going to get solved at some point so then try to find a solution that's how kind of fair code started to exist i wanted to make sure that there is a term that people can use to exactly describe the kind of products because right now that if you look uh online there's like so many projects like for example elasticsearch recently changed the license like more approach is going that way but none of them is allowed to use open source term anymore or have any alternative terms by creating a term and making clear what it means people can understand what fare code stands for this they know exactly hey for me fair code doesn't make a difference it's from these directly exchangeable with open source i can still know i can use it for free which matters for the most end users but at the same time also know okay if i want to commercialize it it's not allowed um i had a moodle conversation with multiple people and one of them was also kenneth he was also part of the github conversation and when i was in san francisco beginning of last year i actually met with him in a pub and we realized that our ideas about how an alternative to open source should look like pretty much aligned so we then created a fair code definition in the website and then we launched that as soon as i posted that to in this github issue the most people actually quite relieved and surprisingly the most conversation stopped then so that means it kind of worked there were still some discussions around me using the terms open and free but that are minor issues i think even like the president of the oc and the person started conversation was quite happy about the solution meaning they didn't have a problem of the project not being open source they had to really the main problem was really to using the term so that was the background um so what does fair code really mean it means the source code is openly available and visible people can distribute it and they can still use it totally for free the only thing that's really not allowed is that you can use the code to directly earn money with it so you cannot use that code and you can start your own project and charge people for it so now why should anybody choose fair code or what are other advantages for for using for fair code um the advantage for maintenance i think is very clear like you have you can release your product for free for everybody but you still have a clear way to monetize a product especially don't you have to go do not have to go down the open core route which i also wanted to avoid because open core always means i have to make my product artificially worse to earn money and i wanted to make sure that everybody has the best available product to use for free without that restriction in place also open source approaches actually win the reason for that is that fair code projects like us are normally financially more viable meaning they have more money to spend and it's also in our interest to support projects we depend upon ourselves like that's what we do for example like every employee and at end he can this decide where to spend one and that donates 100 a month to what kind of open source project meaning like this we can help the approaches we depend upon and they can help the open source ecosystem in general also it's in the interest of the users because they can still use the product for free but they know that the product behind is financially healthy and they know that the project can spend money on hiring people to for example fix bugs add new features improve the documentation and answer questions that form and so on even the companies that have to get our license have to pay for them even they are actually winning at least what i also realized in many conversations ahead because they know that the money they're spending doesn't go it's not lost the money goes directly back into the project meaning the money they spend goes into adding new features and making the product better and more stable which makes their product on the other hand also better and more stable so you have this size of circle where everybody is winning okay i think a little bit of my time sorry but yeah i hope that makes it clear

cool thank you so much jan and uh we have a four minute q a slot so in case you have any questions to ask jan uh please send them through in the chat and we'll answer them stefan says thank you for the explanation much appreciated should we maybe drop a link to fear code uh fair codes website i'll do that in the chat in case you'd like to go check it out um punit asks what is the cost of a license um jan i think i'll have to unmute you there you go okay the sun is trying sorry um the cost of a license there's no fixed cost what we're doing is like we normally do um revenue uh something like revenue share one second sorry it just sounds like revenue share meaning like we want to make sure that if that people only have to pay us if they actually earn money and at the same time we can make sure that if the product grows we're growing with them it means like it's really very flexible but normally we do revenue shared here so that the amount really depends on the project and how they're going to earn money and if it's b2b or b2c but so if anybody's interested they can simply read write an email to license at nioh and then i can we can have a conversation about it cool so the next question is from tom who asks nice to hear about the background of fear code do you know if the model was adopted by other projects um i heard about two projects one i said they forgot the name the other one is xerxes this is like in marketing um i don't know how to describe this stuff but i think alexis if you typed it in i can post a link they also adopted it and i think maybe some smaller ones but there's actually one thing i'm working on right now is getting the term fair code more widely known and also talking with companies that's actually already using fair code compatible licenses to actually get them to adopt the the term because i think the more people adopt it the obviously the better is going to be for everybody if people understand what it's for what it means cool um then we have a question um what's the percentage from revenue that will be charged um that's really depends really on the use case um b to b charge we charge normally more than b to c because they have um obviously then there's the server cost that the fixed cost they have per month is much higher so it's really a case-by-case decision for example they really range from very low to probably around 30 percent because we have for example also some normally we aim for around 30 percent but if people have higher costs for example a very high server cost or they have for example high traffic costs or we work with some company that does for example seo and they have high costs regarding that to get the data that we also go lower in the end normally i go also lower if i see that in the end it's what's important for me is that if we agree on the terms now i want to make sure that they're long-term viable and feel right for both sides meaning i don't want to renegotiate it again in a year for me it's much more important that they make money and we make money both sides feel like it's a fair deal and if they say hey 30 is too much then we do less if they have a reason and i was like we just close actually one deal and he offered 30 but after the costs he had i said okay let's do 25 because it just makes much more sense if he wants to better sustainable business so we're quite flexible there cool thanks jan um so i see we have one more question from beyond uh sorry beyond we covered it during the office hours at the end if that's okay um cool so moving on to the next session

is jason mcfeetus who is going to give us an introduction to na10 so jason take it away thanks a lot tennie and thanks john that was a good information and good insight for uh for a lot of us i think what i'm going to do just to begin here is share my screen and kind of have to get you to allow me to do that hardship could you um okay just a second jason no problem one of the nice things about the naden team they always uh work together to uh get the uh the problem resolved this i'm gonna try now ah there we go awesome perfect so everybody should be able to see my screen now 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 uh 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 milking cows feeding chickens that type of thing which is often an unusual thing nowadays where so many people grow 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 uh 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 um 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 a lot of different 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 the different tech and stuff i was stuck there you know digging in the dirt and 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 where we're 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 i do with 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 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 work 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 sign up 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 this is the third generation of this workflow tool that i've created and what this does is it allows you to give people a url they can then use that url to see a web page you can sign up to the webpage it saves the people's information in a grid on a tool called base row and then from there it will send them an email where they can click on the registration to confirm that their email is a 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 earl 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 node these three nodes will actually create the web page dynamically so that it basically turns ended in into a web server so we can go to that page so here's a link to the sign up page so this web page that you see here was written and created one hundred percent in nad 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 um in base row so it put this information in and created this guide and we'll see that now i've just had an 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 confirmed check mark so once again all of that was handled by all of these three workflows this is a relatively simple uh set up this took me i think all told 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 completely self-sufficient so i don't need a web server i don't need to worry about other services um yes i use grid but easy enough for me to take this these two grid nodes that i'm calling grid nodes but they're actually http request nodes take those two nodes and replace them with um a file uh write it and read so save all that information locally um so as you can see very powerful the reason i wanted to do something like this because um i was on a uh call a couple days ago with somebody and they referred to any end as middleware and to be frank that's kind of where i started out because i was looking at any dan 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 penny i'm going to hand it back over to you cool um that's really cool thanks so

much essen and yeah like if you have any questions please um send them along in the chat could be any hand related questions regarding um jason's workflow i will even answer questions about uh living on the farm there we go okay so i see a question um will there be a blog post about the workflow um oh if i must absolutely i would more than happy to uh write a blog post on the naden blog about this and like i said i will also make the workflow available on um on the uh in it and website where you guys can pull it down and make it your own awesome then we have a question from richard uh can you show how the create form file node works sure let me reshare my screen so there's really two parts to that um the first one is the create the html form so this is really just this is a set um form yeah actually you guys can see there we go um so this is a set form the create html form that we have this one here just a regular set form all i did is i created a variable called html and i gave it a value of surprise prize the html and then i passed that through to the create form file which looks to the html source creates an html key and then it will spit out a binary and because i've set up the web hook to show the first binary property called html it will actually spit it out as a file so it's kind of a it's a neat little trick that yes this is all just text and stuff we're working with but we make the rest of the internet think it's actually a file so there's some really interesting applications around this because you're not stuck with just html you could do something that will convert it into like a pdf file so great potential to maybe turn this into a pdf generator or even if you wanted to get really funky if you could hook into a compiler on the back end you could custom compile in real time applications for people that they would have their own version of an application and they would actually get the executable that they could download so there's some very neat things that you can do with that so imagine being able to offer a curated application that every app person who gets it it's their own specific version that's not just controlled by a config file the actual binary is their own sounds like maybe uh you could do some interesting things with nfts with that for those of you who are into that thing cool um any other questions okay we wait for a minute before we move on and don't be afraid to reach out to me about other things even outside of this i even do bar mitzvahs more than happy to help with pretty much anything what's the best way to reach out to you jason uh your best bet is to catch me on uh twitter usually that's where i am found and i will even go right back to page one right there so usually known as teflon or teflon dude around um there's been a few times people have i've met people as jason and even when i first started working for n8n um john uh posted out the oh by the way you may know jason as teflon and a few jaws i could hear dropped from berlin uh surprised with who i actually was so people don't tend to expect a 50-something old dude as a guy who to get to know his teflon awesome um okay thank you so much jason no problem i will hand things back to you perfect thank you if i can figure out how to stop sharing oh here it is okay and then

next up is richard so let me oops appreciate oh perfect there we go can you guys hear me yes cool um before i go that was awesome i until that moment i was still thinking about it and mostly as connecting in between so uh really just like change the way i see the whole product uh in any case what i wanted to show you guys today was um more on the business side of what you can accomplish with n and a bunch of other tools as well so let me share my screen okay where's the i think it's your full screen can you guys see my screen perfect cool so um yeah i'll just get started basically my talk is called delighting customers at scale using n8n to power in operations heavy business so a little bit of background on me um i'm more just like a maker independent entrepreneur um i've been running a web design business with my wife now for a handful of years but that's pretty part time at this point and now i'm we're really focused on like just building side projects working on things trying to build up the portfolio of independent businesses profitable businesses so that's kind of the idea um i'm buddies with ben from the nan team so i chatted with him in the fall of last year so not too many months ago told me about nan got me early access to um in cloud and i had a project in mind that i wanted to test out so i had recently moved to portugal about a year ago one piece of the puzzle was getting a tax id which is a little bit challenging because you need to get a portuguese citizen to actually apply on your behalf um and i noticed that there weren't many ways for there wasn't an easy way to get that done people would go to facebook groups and they'd be like hey who can help me get this tax id and basically everyone's like oh dm this person or dm that person there's like no website there's no price transparency um none of this kind of stuff looks like max is trying to enter and uh so my wife and i thought like oh why don't we just put together a simple website collect the order find a law firm partner here locally in portugal to actually get the tax id for people and you know whatever see if we can make a couple of orders a month and have a nice little dinner or something that was the idea um it kind of turned out to be a little bit bigger than that and i'll show you guys the results so far um but let's go ahead so let me see this okay i don't wonder how i hide this thing uh whatever let's roll with this okay so border is our company name um and at this point we start out with just like helping people get tax id but we're reformulating how we view ourselves and we're thinking about more like we help people relocate to portugal so we started with tax id but we're working on bank account services and a number of other services in the pipeline as well let's go ahead started as a side project launched on twitter got my first customer a couple days later from twitter and then we started reaching out to influencers primarily on youtube people who had moved to portugal talking about the process of moving here and a lot of their audience are interested in relocating here a lot of retirees like leaving the united states or wherever country and trying to come here so and the tax id recently has become a requirement for submitting your application so that's the key a key component here so in the past few months a lot has happened and i'll show you some stats we've earned 51 000 over fifty thousand dollars in revenue uh and we've actually we've fulfilled over 350 paid orders that's unique customers um and we also have a waitlist of about 250 people on the bank account services and a number of other services beyond that the bank account's the one that we're currently working on um it's still just my wife and myself and i just wanted to show you kind of what i've been we'll be able to achieve primarily because of in it and to be honest um this is our trust pilot review as you can see people like us we've had 54 reviews so far all five stars hundred percent um what's really funny is that if you take a look at our reviews if you just read some of these things like richard kept me informed along the way which is greatly appreciated um basically people are thinking since we're i'm using nhn to send transactional emails using postmark as my email provider i just sign off the emails as my own name and if they respond of course i respond but people actually think that i'm the one keeping them up to date at every step of the way but um so it works out for everyone you know it's uh it's pretty nice and we do have transaction emails like literally for receiving your order when you submit your um power of attorney that's been signed and then like literally you know every day or so you get a message and we've been fortunate enough to have a pretty quick turnaround so just after a few days we've been able to turn the tax ids around to our customers i'll show you our tech stock and this is where it got really fun on the front end we're using next. js just a simple static website i'm using paper form as our checkout so this handles the information intake it also handles the payment along with power by strike um using airtable as our backend database at the moment everything gets sent into there um process street this is for handling um like tasks so when we assign we work with law firms right so when we assign a task to the law firm they complete the task there they can upload files what not it basically provides like a self-contained ui so that um they when they upload things they don't mess up i'm not giving access to my air table directly so once they submit something then i send it over to airtable i'm using anvil as a this is an api for generating pdfs postmark for transactional emails zapier a little bit when i have to because some services only or rightly it's on paid on the tier that i'm on only integrate with zapier and don't have an open api but for everything else and i'd much rather use nan it's because it's just a lot more powerful from my perspective um i would say n8n is the much bigger piece that's connecting everything right now and just wanted to show you some of the how we've been able to scale the operations because you know as you can imagine like 300 customers there's a ton of people for us to like manually do everything and we started everything manually but over time i've been able to automate more and more with within it and in a lot of these tools so um two two key categories that have helped us scale or one is like automation so i just did a bunch of things here adding the order to air table generating the power fraternity pdf using anvil sending the transactional emails with postmark creating the task in process street so all of these things we used to do manually and now we've been able to automate a lot of it and then secondly is which is super powerful and takes a little bit of creative thinking is like how can you turn some of your parts of your application or some parts of your workflow into self-service options so one part was people would have to up send us their signed pdf and i would manually upload that into airtable and so what i've done instead is i create a paper form where they can and it tracks their id similar to uh i forget your name already but teflon's thing with its guid um it checks that in the url and so then it automatically will update their row and air table with this attached file so the self service is like the super cool stuff i think the automation was the more obvious stuff but the two of these things combined have really enabled us to scale our operations without having to sacrifice any of the um customer service that you know we wanted to provide and let me see so we've got i just wanted to show a couple of screenshots of the workflows that we've got going on here um nothing crazy it's more of the thinking about nan as like the middleware between applications so here i'm using the airtable trigger and then i'm like filtering off that i've got the split and batches node generate like a time stamp and then here like for example over time we've like learned different parts of the application so like um the template is different like the power of attorney is different if you're under 18 or if you're over 18. so we handle that case and then we basically use the http request node i don't recall what this is i think oh this is to generate the pdf using anvil and then um i had to do a workaround with aws to be able to actually update the file in airtable but yeah anyway that that's one workflow for creating the power of attorney um and having it automatically sent to the customer and then this workflow is when we receive the tax id which is called a nif in portugal um i actually just basically attach it to an email send it out to our customer again using the http request node as well and this integrates with a postmark and then i up i update an error table just basically logging to make sure that we um we know that we've sent these things out um and that's about it so i'll leave it at that if you guys have any questions uh about the business side about the implementation side happy dancer cool thank you so much richard so i already see a question it says nice can you please explain how you generate the pdf file yeah sure um basically let me see if i can well okay so i won't open it right now but basically what i use is i can just kind of stop sharing screen okay um so basically i use this service called use and build i believe and they allow you to have uh to create like templates and in those templates they have you can insert variables and so uh and then you can basically just use like a post request to actually generate a pdf and so what happens is i collect the data from airtable so i get the fields that i need and then i run a post request over to anvil anvil will generate that pdf and it actually returns the actual file to me so then in that situation what i have to do next is actually have to get a live link i actually upload it temporarily to aws s3 and that's how i'm able to move that over to our table cool then i see a question from puneet who asks can you elaborate by na10 over zapier basically pros and cons for you oh yeah for sure uh i think zapier is really good so the way i see it is zap zapier abstracts a lot more or tries to extract the code a lot more than n8n does and i feel is more like a ui on top of the apis so one thing here that becomes very obvious is like when you're working with the air table api zapier does like it just like when i was switching from zapier to air table there was like a lot more um customizability that i had in able to check things but the key differences between innate and zapier for me are like nan is a lot more flexible in terms of maintenance over time you can actually like with zapier you can only add forks like branches at the end of workflows whereas at any end it's just like you can cut it put in the if statement or a fork or a loop whatever you want and you can just move them around um you can copy them and whatnot so i found that to be really nice in zapier i have some like zapier is really good if you do like one two steps like no problem but you know i was doing things where it's like eight nine ten steps and if you wanted to add a fork then you have to like it's really dumb you have to create a completely new workflow try to copy things and you'll miss things it's just a horrible experience so i just found that an 8n is a like for some things zapier is really good if it's very simple but i found that and it then just has a lot more flexibility um then i see a question from uh jason who asks what is your process for identifying parts of your business workflow that you can automate with anything that's a good question um i don't really know i guess like i guess i okay here's the key thing i suppose the key for me is doing the manual work myself i know i kind of intuitively know um or it's easier for me just to identify what is automatable or not my wife who's less technical if she's running the operations manually she doesn't really know what is possible to automate or not and so her solution is kind of just brute force just like okay manually let's just keep going with it and for me it's like i really hate doing the same thing over and over again so that's where like oh it was i got really creative and came up with i can make a self-service solution where the customer can just upload their signed pdf and i don't have to be an in between and then it'll just kind of get routed to the law firm and so it's pretty seamless experience um i think i guess part of it is understanding the possibilities of how things can be connected and automated but then experiencing that myself so in a way it's like i even though i don't like experiencing the pain it's like i feel like i need to experience the pain because i'm the one amongst between the two of us in the best position to understand what can be automated or come up with these creative solutions around like self-service cool and i see one more question from max who asks if you had one magic wish to make na10 perfect what would it be interesting um i think i haven't played around with creating nodes yet i was actually trying to do that with 1001 one time that we had run into ran into issues so i think that if that process were more seamless i would do it more frequently um right now it's like i ran into this yesterday actually like i'm i upgraded my paper form subscription so now i can actually get access to their api um i'm actually trying to migrate from air table over to firestore instead and i want to be able basically just you know populate the data from paper form over into firestore and i'm i was thinking about how i can do it in um and at the end because one thing that i want to do is i actually want to upload the file into firestore rather than just putting like a url and i wasn't really sure how to do it so i actually just was like screw it i'll just like do it in zapier first just to get it done and then i'll come back and try to do this more robustly later on so i think something like that i'm not quite exactly i haven't thought about this too too much from the n8n perspective but from a user's perspective it does feel like for some use cases zapier is like faster and i think that if we could if n8n could basically compete better even at those like simple use cases then um then it'd be a no-brainer like i would just like get rid of zapier almost entirely cool and max says awesome thanks right uh one moment does anybody else have any questions

okay then we are gonna move on to our next talk which is by tremor and um take it away please hello everyone thank you tanay um so to today i'm going to talk to you about uh the use case that uh that i use mostly on na10 and to give you a little bit of context uh i work on a tech company and i was on the growth team which was mostly doing the acquisition side of things which means that i had to automate the lead generation and for that i had to work with growth marketers which are the one who were gonna build the workflow and i was the one doing the discovery for using na10 so to give a little bit of context of why i choose an a10 i think that richard explained it uh completely just before uh which was the struggle of zapier instagram or anything to create branches where in an a10 i could create the workflow that i wanted with the complexity that i needed i could do everything that i had in my mind and also i had all of the um integration that i needed i don't know if i can sure i can't share my screen right now but as soon as i can i'm gonna show you something okay so basically i needed to connect all of the different tools that i was using internally for the lead acquisition uh things it was mostly for the engage part of things like talking to the customer or the prospect and for that we add internally a lot of data that we provided to our growth marketers and we allowed them to use all of this data so basically what we created was a way for our gross marketers to automate all the of the lead equity acquisition and for that they we provided them with a web book where we sent the data for each segment of prospects they wanted for example they wanted all the people that worked in finance that had a company of a size of more than 50 employees this would go through a web book and then they could create their whole workflow with all the condition they needed so check in the crm if we already know this person or not if we do not then do an action if we do then we stop the workflow or maybe we will send it some kind of email telling hey we exist something like that but we went to uh we had a little struggle that we managed to uh overcome thanks to the uh na10 and what it allows us to do we are basically able to if we have a problem we can solve it in any way we want and mostly with this http request and a web book handler what's really cool is that in the same canvas we can have multiple web book triggers for an action so basically here our my use case was that i had some prospects that would come through this web book but at some step i was missing the email and without the email i'm not able to contact my prospect so i had an action that here imagine that it is an http request that asks for service for an email but sometimes the service would not give me an email so i would be it would be problematic as i would i wouldn't be able to continue the workflow and so internally we created something we asked humans to do the task but the process is it was asynchronous the the people that were gonna do the action and try to find the email by hand would not do it instantly so we could not just use http requests so for that we created our own services somewhere so it could be any services that provides you with a http call when the action is finished and so here i define something called return url which has the value for the webhook just behind so now my gross marketers were able to overcome this issue of asynchronous steps by just creating a request to our server the human would do the access the action and when the action would finish i would get back the answer here and continue the flow as if not nothing happened and there were no asynchronous steps so now uh as of right now my growth marketers are completely autonomous they don't need any technical skills and they automated more than 10 workflows to create the lead generation of my company and now we can say proudly that every week we have more than 100 qualified leads that come through the pipes and uh i don't have the value now for as of many uh became customers but i'm sure that it's gonna grow uh in the next few weeks few months and that's mostly thanks to an a10 and yeah if you have any questions go for it it's awesome thank you so much kendall so yeah please share your questions in the chat okay so we kind of move on to um oh okay we i do see your question so how long did this take you to put together from adam uh well we it was mostly in the discovery phase uh that i did with max and a little bit with tanay we i asked about this asynchronous uh thing and uh we talked a little bit about how we could do it and this came uh came out right quite early uh the what took the most time was we had to create uh inner uh tools because we had to we have our custom enrichment tools or custom yeah so we had to create our own nodes for that for this um no uh the nodes at the bottom template are not templated actions uh they're just the nodes that we use internally i i wasn't sure i could show the workflow entirely so i just showed you the different nodes that we connect but yeah we had to create our own nodes and that was what took the most time but uh again tane helped me with the creation so it was a pretty smooth to do that cool thanks a lot gemma and then we move on sorry um okay so we'll move on to uh the next session so unfortunately because of an emergency michael is unable to attend today

but hershel will be showcasing something cool that he built with na10 um so how should please take it away all right uh hello everyone let me start with sharing my screen here we go awesome uh so my name is harshal and i work as a junior developer advocate at n10 and i love to experiment with new tools and technologies and every day i try to you know connect anything with different stuff so recently i've been playing around with uh connecting n10 with ios shortcuts and i have been able to successfully do that uh so that's something interesting and i'm always playing around with on it and uh so a few months back i built an application for tracking my expenses so uh i had to move to berlin and i was i'm not pretty good at tracking my expenses so i was like hey i need to do something because if i you know run out of berlin so if i run out of money in berlin i don't have any other shows to survive right so i uh i came up with this uh interesting tool that bravo studio which basically uh thunder inter introduced me to and i really liked the concept about it so it is basically using uh the figma design to build the front end of the application so this is the uh design that i am currently using so if you see there are like three different screens the first screen gives two options to add new receipt and you know just check my receipt and there is this another screen which will basically embeds a type form where i can upload an image the processing all this processing happens in n10 and then it adds the information to my table which is again connected to my application and that information i can see in my receipt screen so let me show you how it looks in a time so as i mentioned i am using the type from a typeform to get this information so i use the typeform trigger node so whenever i submit a new receipt this workflow gets executed it gets and then the http request node gets the image from the form and the most interesting part happens in the mind node which basically uh extracts all the necessary information like the name of the merchant the amount that i spent the date of the invoice and all these things and then in the set note i am setting all the information that i want uh to store in my add table and then i'm just appending it to the table so let me quickly try to execute this and show you how it looks a file i hope i have a receipt and i'm going to submit this if i come back over here you see all my nodes got executed and it's working so let's check all the nodes individually if i check on the typeform node i basically get the url which i am using which i'm using in the next node that is the http request node to fetch the binary right if i click on binary and show binary data you can see the image over here now earlier this was you know a manual process this could have been a manual process to you know add the name of the merchant add the category and then add the amount as well so with the mind node uh it extracts all the information so you can see i got the currency the name of the merchant the amount the date as well as the category so that was really helpful to you know uh automate it and then the set node as i mentioned earlier i'm just using it to set the information that i basically want to append to our table and then the table over here just appends the information so if i go to my add table okay huh yeah over here so it has the information the amount and all the information that i want so currently i am uh trying to do something over here instead of using the type form i am just trying to use a ios shortcut so you know i don't have to open the application i can just uh click on that shortcut take a picture and you know uh allow an attempt to do the processing and then you know add it to the ad table so that's some of the things that i'm currently experimenting with and i am also trying to you know uh scale this application where you know i can also specify that hey this is the thing this is something that i bought for me and my friend and we have to you know uh divide this amount among ourselves so that is something also that i'm kind of currently working on and yeah that's the time uh i am looking forward to you know uh skill cool thanks a lot hasher um do we have any questions how did you come up with the ios shortcut idea that's a good question so i recently got i usually got an iphone and you know i was like checking out like as i said you know i very much like technology and experiment things so i was like hey i have a shortcut this is something new let's try it out so that's how you know i came up with the idea of uh playing around with ios shortcut and ntn and that's basically how i got the idea cool do we have any other questions regarding this session chris mentions he used the google drive scan app without automation but this is really cool awesome so thank you so much and before

we head on to the office hours part where we'll answer questions um i'd like to just extend a big thanks to our speakers and all of you who took out the time to attend our first meetup and we are really excited to be able to support you in your automation journey and really can't wait to see what you build so in case you're heading out i wish you a great weekend and for those of you who are joining us for the office hours if you have any questions for any of the speakers about their sessions about na10 your use cases or workflows please send them along in the chat and we'd be very happy to help um okay so i think um let me unmute yarn um so yeah and we had a question from before that we didn't answer from beyond uh what was the question i'm just digging it up so he says not related to license but what's the current goal or roadmap for the company team scaling etc um roadmap for sk like for the product what we are currently focusing on for product company is getting edit and version 1. 0 routes meaning we make it and makes things more consistent more stable easier to use feature-wise are we working right now on user management and another big feature that's going to come up next is going to be multi-tenancy um scale-wise are we currently as of today via a team of 16 people and after year we are aiming to be around 25 i'm not sure what other aspects you mean maybe or the answer question beyond case um like you have more follow-up questions please share um till then we're gonna move on to the next one uh so question from sean um are there plans to incorporate team management for the community version i mean team management i mean i guess is user management and at the community version like there is no difference between the normal community version and the hosted version or anything else like there's only one code and they're all one percent identical so even the cloud runs the same docker image you can download for free which means the user management kind of get added to the totally regular version like everything else good so i see a question that got answered uh yeah usenville. com was the pdf generator that richard had there's also another one we used that recently is api template it's very cheap and seems to work fine so i can just recommend it also i think they have like 53 per month cool um any other questions folks okay so um how do people find third-party services um is that from eurasia yeah it's kind of a two-part thing but my thing got cut but basically i saw mindy and we're just curious how you guys typically um search for apis like one of the things that we collect we collect passports and right now we're manually checking and i'm just looking at 9d and they have passport extraction as a use case i'm like well maybe i should just use that instead of manually doing it you know so just curious if like i don't know how you guys typically discover these nodes search them hello okay um there are multiple ways like some for some notes obviously we get pull requests so external people create them if we create the extension and the notes normally we get them from the community meeting people can request nodes to be created they can upload it and then the more people upload them more interest is obviously then the higher priority it is for us additionally do we look for interesting use cases we think and it and could be particularly helpful and then think about okay how could we solve that problem then we look for nodes who would need to do that and then we create them but right now it's pretty much the most of them are community driven cool so i see another question from tom can you share your plans for organizing larger number of workflows going forward this was a topic on the forum a while back and i would be interested to hear what's coming up i think probably max can talk about best about that he just signed that see i think your property is the one you're talking about regarding the forum ah yes hi everyone um so it's in progress right now the and to give you an idea because in progress it's maybe a bit ambiguous um the feature's been designed and it's being coded out and even today i was uh working with mutasm on some of the front-end stuff there so it's very much being developed and will be released the idea there is it's a free-form workflow tagging so you can create tags um and then apply them to your workflows and then in your workflows view we'll be making some changes there so you can sort of do some filtering combining tags and whatnot so that's the plan for that one that should be out relatively soon cool thanks max um another question upcoming features that was a cool question um like um we've just talked about the workflow organization use management one is gonna um another one is also right now it's very hard to discover some notes within it n so the note creation um tab you know on the right side that currently lists like all the notes in no particular fashion except that they're alphabetically ordered one of the features going to come out there is that they are categorized so you can find them by category and you can also the corner is going to get listed first because we had the problems that a lot of people didn't even know about the very important core notes and like that we now make sure that this very important corners get listed first so that nobody else can miss them anymore which isn't going to make anything much generally much easier usable because yeah without a lot of core functionality things are much more complicated and have to be i think that the main things are coming up right now we also had david joyne um last week he's the new head of product and yeah there's more things going to come up there soon yeah yes hey everybody guys yeah thanks for meeting me man um yeah nice to meet you all uh like jan said i've just joined um but very much looking forward to um getting up to the speed and uh improving this product as fast as possible to make it as useful as we can for you so i've heard some great suggestions uh on this call and also in uh individual calls with people and would love to um maybe set up some individual sessions with some of you to hear about how you use na10 and what you would like to see in the future i'll put my email in the chat uh you can just ping me and we can set something up perfect and uh we can find you in the forum as well right david absolutely yeah awesome cool so the next question we have is how do you name your workflows or version control them how do i name them to be honest um at the moment that i did not find the perfect system yet i really hope that as soon as you have the workflow attacking the name is going to become less important so i have normally i separate columns separate them like normally kind of use case and then a more specific name that i find it easy because we don't have taking and so get around that but sorry there's nothing i can share there okay listen yeah um the next question is uh would you consider note sprint sessions no sprint session sorry um jean could you maybe add a bit more about that okay um meanwhile i see another question what are the biggest or most complex workflows that you've ever seen i think there's actually there's a nice threat in the forum about that um i'll drop a link to that yeah there are some really cool use cases uh examples i just posted the link already these are probably one of the most complex ones um like i normally tend to making them more modular like i use the execute comma i actually do workflow note a lot meaning i create sub workflows and split them into a smaller piece that like me make get them too big so my workloads are normally quite short because i split them apart like that so i can also recommend that it makes stuff more modular and easier to extend and easier to understand especially cool thanks jan um i see another question uh from john um or demo sessions that's how to create notes um so i can share a link to our youtube channel um me and two of our colleagues did some um live oh i sent it as a direct message put it in the chat um we did some live streaming sessions uh showcasing how we created some notes with post hoc and d-pad um we're gonna have more of these weekly live streams going forward so um watch our youtube channel and uh twitch channel as well so more things coming there and regarding no creations also the no creation guide got updated and extended a lot and there's also one upcoming for the trigger notes i think it's much easier to get started with no creation than it was a few months ago i'm dropping a link as well to the note creation guide perfect um uh program is the way to programmatically back up the nodes um around a month ago we added an option to the cli where you can export your workflows as json you can select if you want to export all of them in one file or in different files um if you can theoretically do that with edit any meaning can you create an end workflow that kind of backs up that workflows and then push them into github um there's also there's a git node coming up which would be helpful there to do it with any kind of git not just github sadly there is no current way to do that in a better way like it's still plenty at no for versioning because they are that's i just see how powerful it is and right now that we have for sure some shortcomings regarding especially if you have the same workflow open two times and the overwrite it energy all your changes are gone because you overdid something else so that's gonna be also one priority you want to improve which is general usability and as also workflow versioning is one thing we also want to do sadly right now that's a really big shortcoming on the edit inside sorry about that thanks sam um the next question is it would be um okay i'm not sure if this got answered um is there an internal process for handling the pull requests um right now omar is the point person to look at the pull request meaning normally it will i we have like a workflow which always posts them into a metamouse when there's a new pull request i normally try to review them directly said sadly this might time sometimes very limited so i don't really find time for that then there's umar which is deep skills and has a deeper look at them to be honest right now we are doing not a very amazing job getting pull requests merge as fast as you want to because there's simply a huge backlog and so much other stuff going on right now more news in the next weeks about that um but i really we are working also improving that workflow making sure that the process of merging full requests gets speeded up and is also more clear especially did we have in the past very often pull requests they did not get merged for a long time because partly i was not sure if they're right for edit n or not the current stage so in the future i we really tried to also improve that meaning if we don't want to merge a pull request we want to communicate it very directly very fast and say why we don't do that just that it's very clear for the community why it is and repair on the subject if somebody wants to create like a bigger feature especially a core feature in edit n they're obviously always more than welcome but we can in this sense obviously the more deep they are and the more complex they are the lower the chances that they get merged without having to talk to us first so if you want to make like a bigger chord change and you have an idea it would be really great if you reach out to us also ask in the forum and then we have a short conversation with the engineers that the staff get implemented the right way that we can make sure that the work is not lost because like it's very horrible if we know that somebody invests a lot of time and their work is lost and it's even worse for the person who did all the work so you really want to make sure that it doesn't happen so please if you want to make any larger changes reach outside first and then we can have a short chat about that kujana had a follow-up question about that so while discussing these features uh that are related to core or nodes so where what's the best place to have this discussion is that as a github issue or should it uh should it be on the community forum uh always like for now what we do is we have everything in a community form except um bugs maybe they're going to reiterate it at some point but at the moment we try to keep everything in the forum as long as possible unless it's really back because they have to be directly code related but please open something in the forum first cool so i think we have covered all the questions that in the chat um in case i missed the question please please uh paste it again i'm sorry um and yeah i think um we'll be on light for 10 more minutes in case you have any questions as people are dropping off also thank you everybody for joining us really great they've been part of the first meet up ever so yeah looking forward to many more very appreciated thanks so the next meet up i see a question around the next meetup so should be roughly around in a month so once we finalize the list of speakers and so on we should send out an invite very soon okay i see another question um would it be possible to export the workflows to aws lambda or cloud fair workers uh i want to reduce the startup latency it's from yourself to lambda yes you could yeah i never did it but i don't see a reason why it wouldn't be possible but to be yeah it should be possible yes but it not sure what you want to do if you want to start one specific workflow if you want to have ended in like you could do it if you want to have one specific workflow like we still have the cli that runs the workflow and then stops so it would work fine you could obviously not have edit and running in lambda because like things like trigger nodes like the chrome node it really depends that editing keeps on running forever and doesn't get stopped in between so if you really just want to have a workflow run then it would be possible but we don't have an example for that right now i've actually used lambda for a couple of things and essentially i already had something running in lambda that could accept a web hook connection so basically turned lambda into a form of a api and then i just did an api call out using the http request node from naden and got it to process the data got the data back to me and then was able to carry on with the workflow from there so i may be admitting i missed the question i thought it was about running a vocal in lambda if it is um executing a lambda function and getting the data into it and we even have a lambda function a lambda node which also can do that it would also be possible without the http request node sorry the question there or maybe i did that's possible too uh i see another comment from yusuf he says are usually the web hook workflows are pretty slow so i would like to host them on lambda just that maybe clarify the question the web hook workflows are pretty slow um that sounds like the edit n is actually much faster than lambda generally the only thing i can think of right now while it would be slow if you use the default mode in the default mode it starts a new process for every workflow execution meaning it has like a second startup time for that reason but if you start everything in the main process i post a link to that in a second it's just setting one environment variable and then it's gonna run everything in the main process actually and you get a gonna get a response incredibly fast so it's going to be much faster than doing it in lambda here's the node here's the documentation link so if you just set an environment variable and then it's going to be super fast there cool right folks any other questions before we uh part for the evening i have one quick question jan uh how i what automations do you use in your day-to-day life to be honest i use because actually i just i don't have anything privately automated to be honest it's all work related to 100 percentage and also it's like actually all like you have a lot of metamor slash commands that i created and i use a lot like getting statistics setting up like for getting callings things like that they're like mainly gathering data into a lot and i for example also have like something we're going to launch soon it's like bash dash where you can actually have like slash commands in the terminal i mean like i have like one command where i use asana for for tracking the task i have to do i also have like a slash command there i touch the slash dash asana and then the task stuff like that just to don't have to open asana first it takes a long time just try to always save up a few uh shape of a few seconds there every time things like that i do a lot about a lot of gate and that gathering because there's always things that took me a long time and it also data collection like we have this one workflow that collects everyday like a data from github from cloud from facebook from linkedin from everywhere else all the data and saves it that we know how we are growing and how people are using n so it's a lot of data related things on my side cool and i sent a link to a post that we published that matter most a few i think yesterday and uh it covers like some of the automations that we use with our chat tool so in case you're looking for inspiration i think that's a good source as well and because i just see a conversation upon about the main setting like it's it makes edit they're not just much faster it's also going to need much less memory because you don't have to speed up as a spin up a new process so even if you have to want to have a high throughput through edit and you really have to set that setting it's going to make a huge difference about on the performance of editing all right folks in case uh we wait one more minute and in case there are no more questions um we'll call it an evening okay all right everyone um thank you so much for joining us um it was really cool to have you all join um and thanks to the speakers as well for presenting what they have been working on and sharing with the community so see you in the next meetup and have a nice weekend everyone and thanks tonight hashtag for organizing everything really cool great work and thanks everybody participating see ya ciao bye everyone bye