Recent Discussions
May 22nd Portland Qrew Meetup 3PM
The Portland Qrew is meeting next week on Wednesday at 3PM PST at the Harder Mechanical Contractors offices in Portland, OR. Our goal for this meetup is to collaborate and solve some problems. We have an interesting data model to discuss that looks a lot like an infinite tree structure. Afterwards with the weather being pleasant, it is possible we find ourselves seated outside eating tacos. If you are interested in attending via Teams, please email me directly at jharrison@harder.com and I will send an invitation.0likes0CommentsApril 2024 Qrew Notes
Attendees: Jen Clarke, Elena Larrabee, Lee Gilmore, Jim Harrison, Diego Alvarez This months meeting was a collaborative event. We wound up talking the entire time. Usually we are problem solving on different projects. This time there weren't any pressing problems to solve. We started the conversation with our current projects. We started the meeting talking about what we have been working on this past month. Elena is settling in at Quickbase to build Apps for Quickbase Customers, which sounds very interesting. Jen is growing her team and getting some much needed assistance. It is always good to have a plan b and it sounds like Jens work is important enough to require a plan b, well done Jen! Diego showed Dashboards he is building for the Team in Arizona. The dashboards are looking very useful for the teams in Arizona. Next we talked about Empower and what is happening with Quickbase in general. Overall the consensus is we are looking forward to Empower. It was brought up that we should get together for a local Empower for the Qrew. After some conversation with the Harder leadership, we are hosing virtual Empower at the HMC office. How it turns out is up in the air. There will be bagels, so it should be fine. It feels like this is a solution with many benefits as long as the expectations are within reason, for example there will be cream cheese for the bagels. Afterwards we headed to Prost for a pint of German ale and some German snacks. Community Email and Notifications are still offline but I will keep posting here to let folks know there is a light on.0likes0CommentsApril 24th Portland Qrew Meetup 3PM
The April Qrew meetup is scheduled for April 24th at 3PM. I haven't even thought about a presentation so if anyone has anything he or she wants to present, let me know. If no one wants to present, the event will be collaborative as that tends to be very useful. We can also chat about the new Community and the Beta Navigation if anyone is interested in seeing what that looks like. Location: Harder Mechanical Contractors Address: 2148 NE Martin Luther King Jr Blvd, Portland, OR 97212 Time: 3 PM PST - 5 PM (and then we usually hang out till 7) RSVP: email jharrison@harder.com Remote Access: email jharrison@harder.com and we will send a Teams invitation1like0CommentsMarch 2024 Meetup Notes
March Qrew meetup was a collaborative event. The event was not only useful but a lot of fun. We started out talking about Mobile Quickbase versus FastField forms and the pros and cons of each. The general consensus being there doesn't appear to be much benefit in either option, except for adding records to a table - in a limited fashion and Quickbase does that already. It's great to have these conversations and we are all looking forward to the rich opportunities Quickbase develops with either one of these offerings. Next we moved on to my collaborative effort: Pipeline export, import process with YAML. Lee Gilmore, walked me through the process of exporting the YAML, updating slugs and then importing to a different User account. The entire process is super easy and I am relieved I don't have to go figure it out myself. Thank you Lee! I now have some maintenance to do to move personal Pipelines into our Service Account. Next Jen Clarke asked about updating existing Pipelines via YAML instead of using the Drag and Drop interface. Reason being, her experience is once the Pipeline reaches a certain level of complexity, the interface slows down. The user interface slow down reduces the flow of building and maintaining. Reduced flow increases frustration causing Jen to think about alternative ways to update the code. We exported a long process (that is really cool) and examined the YAML. In the process of looking at the YAML together, the idea of adding a field or modifying a query was made a little less daunting. Hopefully we get the opportunity to work on more YAML coding in the coming months. The idea of YAML coding leads me to make it a goal to become fluent in reading and writing YAML and completely skip the drag and drop UI experience. Once the service account in Incognito mode problem is resolved, having that knowledge opens Harder to adopting Pipelines for simple tasks like garbage collection and logging. It is likely this is the area we will begin to leverage Pipelines for the time being. After all that Pipeline YAML stuff, we headed over to Steeplejack for a pint and some food and continued our conversation about Quickbase, Elena's new job (congratulations) and our plans or goals for the future. It was another excellent meetup and left us all looking forward to the next one in April.0likes0Comments