Who are you, What is your background, Why n8n

So I started writing this message personally (PM) to @MutedJam but, then I realized in the French Community (maybe they are more socialist, who knows) they asked these kinds of questions a while ago; so here I am… (and I hope my basic research didn’t trick me :stuck_out_tongue:)
anyway (it is too late now) here they are (and hopefully you will learn and interact too) :slight_smile:

Basically, since 1984 I learning computer, mainly as a SysAdmin; and obviously n8n is more a programming thing/logic then a let’s try and fail to infinity and beyond

So for me and my kid (she is 6 years old and I teach her scratch and try to teach her critical thinking/logic)

Who are you (Han Solo of the automation) ?

  • What is your background
    • What is the thing who make you think I need to do more, to go forward ?
  • Why n8n (an OpenSource solution) over others (Zapier, If…ttt, I…gr…meta…)
  • What make your feel n8n is the way to go ?
    • and how you will make be sure this is happening ?
2 Likes

So I started out cooking with an interest in computers, taught myself some web programming.

Was lucky enough to move into helping with making games and managing Linux servers.

Got a job writing workflows for MFT software (EFT, GoAnywhere, MOVEit) did some stuff with SSH (Tectia) around key management and SSH servers and DLP.

Currently I do support / special projects with some print management software (the green one), where I am now I put a bunch of Python scripts in place to automate some tasks and wanted to make them easier to maintain and make changes to so I looked at UIPath, Integ…, IFTTsomething, Flow and a couple of others and I spotted an email about the n8n certification so I gave it a go and it just clicked with me.

From there I have moved almost all the scripts over and extended the Zendesk node to support the options we need, fixed a couple of bugs with other nodes and added a new node with 3 more being worked on.

I really like the community and the team, I also like having the ability to quickly extend n8n as needed and be able to fix any bugs that I may run into.

I think that just about covers everything :joy:

6 Likes

Well, seeing you mentioned me, I’ll go next :smiley:

I was always fascinated by information technology and have spend a lot of time than in various computer museums (with this one being my favourite) and in front of whatever systems I could get my hands on, trying to understand what they do and how they work. So eventually I ended up as a support engineer, giving me loads of opportunities to do so.

In most traditional B2B support roles, there’s a lot of recurring work. Users pay a lot of money and expectations are high. If data shown somewhere isn’t exactly what’s needed, people hardly bother with building complex pivot tables or databases, instead they reach out to support. Seeing I am a rather lazy person, I ended up automating most of these recurring tasks through a bunch of scripts (bash and Python mostly) at first.

So when I came across n8n (on Twitter, I think), I immediately thought its fair code license model and the ability to self host was a major differentiator over other tools. Most notably, I could use it without having to worry about any data privacy issues. No data would ever leave the company (and not even the office in fact, I just plugged in a Raspberry Pi into the nearest Ethernet port, this has been my n8n server since).

n8n immediately improved visibility into how I obtained my report data (much easier to understand an n8n workflow than bash scripts, especially for non-technical folks) and since then I’ve been a fan. And now I work here :wink:

I don’t really have any great advice to share with regards to learning though. Personally, I am convinced logical thinking is something that’s useful in virtually any situation (not just computing) so to me it seems you’re already on the right track. To get your hands dirty with n8n specifically, the beginner’s course is great and teaches a lot of n8n-specific concepts:

4 Likes