The Art of Automation and n8n

1. The Art of Automation and n8n

Welcome to this course on workflow automation with n8n!

2. Meet your instructor...

This course was created with Frank Nillard, Founder of Neural Architects - a community of builders, creators, and entrepreneurs using AI and no-code tools to automate their business processes.

3. Why does automation matter?

In this course, you'll learn how to approach automating tedious and repetitive tasks to make space for creativity and critical thinking. Traditionally, automation required complex computer code, or an engineer to hold your hand along the way. But now, tools like n8n have made it possible for anyone to begin automating tasks or elements of their work - no code required!

4. Automating the n8n way!

In n8n, rather than expressing actions and workflows using code, we use nodes and connections. Each node is like a building block representing a particular action, like triggering a form, creating a row in a spreadsheet, or sending an email. n8n supports nodes for many common actions and third-party integrations, so we rarely have to code stuff for ourselves! Connections pass data between the nodes, taking the output from one node and inputting it into another. This could be passing the information submitted by a form into a spreadsheet row, or sending a message generated by an AI model to a Slack node to post it in a particular channel. These connections are directional, so the arrows indicate the flow of data in the workflow. Let's see an example in the n8n interface.

5. Exploring n8n Workflows

When we open n8n, we start on the Dashboard, where all our workflows live. Each workflow shows as active or inactive. Using the menu, we can open, share, or archive our workflows. We can also search, sort, and filter workflows by name, date, tags, or status. Tags are great for organizing automations, such as grouping by "marketing" or "sales". We'll go ahead and create a new workflow. From here, we'll import an existing workflow from a file, which makes sharing and re-using automations much simpler. For the coders out there, workflows are stored as JSON files, which are extremely common in software development. Everything in the workflow is stored in a structured and maintainable way. This workflow is designed to fetch the latest currency exchange information from a public API and transform it into an easily-readable format. We can see it contains just two nodes, and the information flows from left to right, indicated by the arrow on the connection. We'll execute the workflow; this starts the node at the beginning of the workflow on the left-hand side. Workflows are started by a special node type called a trigger, which basically kicks the workflow into life, often retrieving the data to start with. This workflow uses a form trigger, which we'll look at in more detail in the next video, but essentially what we input into the form will be passed as input data to the second node. Nodes can be opened by double-clicking them. When each node is opened, you'll see it split into three sections. The left shows the input data - the currencies we selected - the right displays the output data after the node has been executed, and the middle shows the node's configurations. Here, we can see this node took our input currency information, and outputted a simple table with the exchange rate. Depending on the type of data, we can toggle whether to view the data as a table, in JSON structure, or a schema using the tabs. We'll look more at creating our first nodes from scratch in the next video.

6. Why automating with n8n is so delightful!

n8n has a few things that sets it apart from other automation tools. Firstly, it allows you to choose whether to host your workflows on their cloud servers, or whether you'd like to self-host on your own servers. This can make enabling many enterprise use cases much simpler. Second, although we've seen that n8n allows for easy workflow creation through dragging-and-dropping, we can peel away those layers of abstraction if the need arises. We can work with and apply custom code and raw APIs without needing to introduce another tool. Our more advanced n8n courses will dive more deeply into these topics. For now,

7. Let's practice!

time to start exploring some workflows!

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