Special thanks to the n8n team for improving this project every single day.
I’m really excited to know what you guys built last year using n8n. If guys don’t wanna share links, Feel Free to share a Screenshot of your amazing workflow!
Nice one @mcnaveen and thanks for your kind words!
One of the flows I started on in December last year was a Figma workflow that checks if I’ve replied to comments that at-mention me. If I have not replied or resolved the comment within 24 hours, I get a notification in Mattermost (Slack alternative). Here it is:
Between the Figma Trigger and Wait node, it was so cool to see how quickly the core flow came together.
My Goals for 2022:
Continue to explore and implement DesignOps workflows, hopefully even productizing them in some low-code way (big ups to @harshil1712 's GitHub Wrap project - a true inspiration!). Big focus will be on Figma comments and collaboration like:
Syncing figma comments with a “#todo” hashtag to the relevant Notion doc for the feature, same for #spec and a few other tags. Will likely explore doing the same with acceptance criteria, so we can add some automated quality validation for front-end implementation (i.e. ticket gets auto-reverted to “in progress” when changed to done, as not all #AC comments were resolved in Figma; or something like that).
Various flows related to design system integrity + consistency. Things like scanning figma documents for texts that don’t have a style attached; so we can have reports on % of views that have custom overrides (ideally you want to limit this in design systems).
Beyond DesignOps; very interested in flows that recommend/ nudge and assist in day-to-day scenarios. For example, a GCal workflow that recommends adjusting certain meeting times to allow for booking a lunch time with colleagues who are usually busy (i.e. it sees a useless 15min window following a meeting, so recommends moving that meeting back 15mins to book a full 45min lunch slot prior).
2021 has been the year of automation for me. I created a lot of workflows that we use internally at n8n, but also have a couple of them that I use for myself. Let’s see how many I can list:
n8n workflows that manage the whole Beginners course. Right from sending emails on sign-up to creating certificates, all the processes are handled by n8n.
Created an API to convert HTML to Markdown (not public yet)
@harshil1712 Thank you for nominating me to Rewind 2021
2021:
I have been following and using n8n from the start, but 2021 was the year I moved most of my automation over to n8n even though I still have a lifetime account with other tools like Pabbly Connect - Automate All Your Integrations & Task . Having my own server without any limits of flows I can run has really changed the way I think of automation.
Watched over 15 hours of videos about n8n on youtube, my favorite being @harshil1712 ‘s videos.
Built a scraper to detect sites using competitor solutions (think of this as a mini BuiltWith just for my competitor’s software so we can get real-time data) using n8n, rocketscrape.com & mautic
Setup 2-way sync with Hubspot, mautic, and some google sheets to always have one source of data.
Builth out about 3 scrapers to collect unique data for lead enrichment.
I have about 15 complex flows that I plan on adding to n8n (like to start thinking off simple then grow out the flow as I see the basic functions are working)
2022 Goals:
Keep on building our new flows to automate more and more, and find unique ways to add automation into my day-to-day work.
I have about 15 things I plan to automate with n8n, I like to start thinking off simple then grow out the flow as I see the basic functions are working.
I plan on making some how-to videos about n8n so others can learn from my n8n journey
Would like to contribute more to the n8n community in any way I can. (like making this post)
( I may update this post later on if other points of note come to mind, its has been a long year : )
@MutedJam what cool projects have you been working on this past year?
I was following n8n for a while, seeing the progress you guys were making. I decided to dive deep into the product and took the beginner certification course - taking the course actually made me realize how powerful the platform is compared to other solutions. That’s when I decided to run my own server and automate aspects of my productivity workflow as well as my client consultations. For those who don’t know, I do a regular 9-5 and as a side-hustle I help clients build no-code apps and automate existing processes.
Some of my highlights for the year:
Automated productivity related stuff such as Journalling in Notion, Calendar Blocking
Introduced a virtual-assistant to my personal Slack channel which keeps me updated about my day’s meetings as well as my due tasks.
Got invited to write two n8n related blog posts, you can check them out here and here
Joined Opsmate in an Advisory role which is going to use n8n as it’s primary automation tool and help clients implement n8n in their SaaS stack. We are on a mission!
Automate invoice generation for my consulting gigs
2022 Goals:
Continue leveraging n8n for personal as well as business use
Write more about automation and increase social media presence
Build a personal dashboard to keep on top of various life-aspects
Build a microsaas with n8n as a middleware
Quit 9-5 Find a remote-job or go full time consulting, being my own boss
The goals are lofty but I rather dream and fail in the most beautiful way possible. If I succeed, then it was all well worth the ambitions!
I am looking forward to learning more from this amazing product and the amazing group of people it surrounds itself with!
@Sami_Abid, really cool to see how you are using n8n and your post about how to set up n8n for free on Heroku it really reminds me of how I am working on setting up n8n on Oracle Free Teir server
You might be interested in checking it out.
The idea is the easier it is for people to use a tool like n8n the better it is for all of us (and what is better than a free n8n server ; )
Thanks! I am glad you mentioned Oracle’s free tier. It reminds me I have two instances running on the free tier that I am not using - time to put it to use.
I think the only issue will be DNS configuration, did you manage to do that and run an instance off it?
I ran into a small hiccup but I plan on giving it another try this weekend. @MutedJam has been updating the setup guide, and I know I will get it running smoothly very soon : )
So I made a few things with n8n last year but it was mostly script replacement, Replacing older Python scripts with n8n workflows to make them easier to maintain and update.
The main thing I made with n8n in 2021 was new “friends” and that has led to me working for n8n this year (and hopefully many more to follow).
My Goals for 2022:
I want to blog more this year as last year and 2020 kind of went out the window.
There are a couple of tools I made at my last job that I want to remake as examples using n8n
well 2021, spend a lot of time scraping ransomware pages from tor, then improved on that by using puppeteer to scrape the sites to bypass all the security they kept adding, was a cat and mouse game for a while.
So you have the Puppeteer workflow that calls out to my AWS instance.
then used this as a template and expanded to other ransomware blogs.
Goals for 2022, make some more interactive flows that users can submit a query to a webhook and then get a result back. I think, but we will see what happens over the year.
I’ve only really dipped a toe in with regard to production workflows, but what I’m really interested in are confirmation workflows, or human-in-the-loop automation.
Here’s one example of that, thankfully using Slack which makes this incredibly simple for a few reasons:
The Block UI Kit is intuitive, and easy to use and reason about
The Slack app easily integrates with an “interactivity” callback URL (i.e. an n8n webhook)
Trying to recreate something similar with MS Teams was an exercise in frustration
This example workflow
takes a quote request from JotForm
sends a message to an internal Slack channel with the specifics and a link to related files
offers interactive buttons/actions to forward those onto specific vendors.
The top workflow waits for the JotForm Google Drive integration to create files with a formatted unique ID. It uses a split in batches node just in case we get multiple items triggering in the same window.
It prepares some parameters and queries the JotForm API using a sub-workflow and then builds out a Block Kit UI with necessary vendor buttons with structured unique action ID/values.
When that gets to Slack it looks something like this. You can see two buttons are green , that means they’ve been clicked and sent off to vendors. You can also see a confirmation message confirming these particular actions sent redacted versions of the quotes to vendors slack channels.
This is handled by the lower workflow. The webhook URL is registered with the Slack app as the interactivity URL. From here we get authenticated messages with what actions have occurred and importantly who requested them. From here the workflow uses the same JotFrom sub-workflow and sends off details to the required vendor Send to BPO. At the moment this is another Slack, but it could be an email, or any other comms channel.
The rest of the workflow is where the fun stuff happens, Slack kindly sends through the original message that resulted in this action, so we can take that, find the button that was clicked and edit it in-place, making it green with a check mark . We can also add a confirmation dialogue so if it’s clicked again it will confirm with the user within the Slack UI if they want to re-send the quote. Once all that’s complete it will post a confirmation message to the same channel to confirm what action was taken, and by who.
Other examples where a confirmation workflow is useful:
SIEM alert fires for a risky or anomalous user sign-in. Use a workflow to find the user’s manager in LDAP/AD, send them a direct message or email to confirm suspicious behaviour and offer actions to
Kill all logged in sessions
Lock the user account
Reset the account password
A tool detects suspicious outbound traffic, send a message to the sec ops channel with enriched information on the IP/domain with actions to:
Add policy to block traffic at the firewall, proxy, DNS, or EDR
Open a search for all previous traffic to that destination
Run an AV scan on endpoints communicating to this IP
Happy New Year Everyone 
Thanks a lot for sharing.
Find a remote-job or go full time consulting, being my own boss
, that means they’ve been clicked and sent off to vendors. You can also see a confirmation message confirming these particular actions sent redacted versions of the quotes to vendors slack channels.