Interview with n8n.io

As my colleague Scott Brinker recently pointed out, the essence of the “no code” trend is “software that empowers general business users to create things that previously only specialists could produce.”

Anyone can be a “citizen developer”, and the impact of what they build doesn’t have to be limited to their work lives. No code tools can be as useful to a household as they can be to a Fortune 500 company.

With that in mind, of my favourite no code (well, really low code) tools is n8n - an abbreviation of nodemation. The key components of it are pretty simple: nodes that can connect to each other, or trigger actions in each other, through workflows.

It’s interesting to me for a few reasons:

It’s open source, so the community makes it better. A great way to discover new products, and a simple way to connect with edge case consumer products.
It’s a powerful blend of low code and no code. It’s not the easiest workflow automation in the world to use, but non-technical users should find their way around pretty quickly. If you can write JavaScript, you’ll love it even more.
Self-hosted or cloud. If you like nerding about like I do, and figure out how docker works, it’s easy to self-host. A faster route is their recently launched cloud version.

I was interviewed by Tanay Pant, n8n’s Head of Developer Relations, late last year. We covered off a bunch of topics, including automating tax returns, the HubSpot App Partner Program, and the opportunity for home automation to make parenting easier.

Since it was published, some friends of mine have pinged me to let me know it inspired them to create a variety of workflows to help automate their personal lives, including automations to:

Aggregate Gift Aid charity donations to Google Sheets
Pull sleep data from Whoop into Airtable
Use Pushbullet to send crypto price notifications to mobile phones

The use cases and opportunities are virtually limitless. Try it at https://n8n.io/.