Recent Discussions
July 24th Portland Qrew Meetup 3PM
The Portland Qrew is meeting on the fourth Wednesday at 3PM PST at the Harder Mechanical Contractors offices in Portland, OR. The goal for this meetup is to collaborate and solve some problems. Afterwards with the weather being pleasant, it is possible we find ourselves drinking a pint. Anyone interested in attending via Teams, please email me directly atjharrison@harder.com and I will send an invitation.1like0CommentsQrew Meetup Notes June 2024
Tammie King, Elena Larabee, Jen Clarke, Diego Alvarez We started the meeting discussing our latest projects. Jen mentioned working on building a QB Mobile experience. The Harder team has also been working on an initiative for building a mobile experience for Apps in our realm too. We talked about the conversations we are having around standardizing the layout and components required for the Mobile experience versus Desktop. Diego shared the work he has done developing mobile Apps. One idea he is experimenting with is to create a scroll at the top of the Mobile App. His plan for a Left-Right Scroll is to use a report with Rich Text buttons. Looking forward to seeing the results of this idea as it could be useful in many places. Next Elena shared her experiences building service modules for the QB Exchange. The main focus has been on automating the Pipeline YAML export, re-slug and import process, which allows moving changes from Dev to Prod much simpler. This development is an improvement to Quickbase with potential. Elena talked about using ChatGPT to get formulas for Rich Text Buttons. The conversation that suddenly took place between Tammie, Elena and Jen amazing around ChatGTP was amazing. Here are some of the recommendations shared during the conversation. The best ChatGPT writing QB suggestions: Give ChatGPT the link to the documentation and then ask it to review the code. You have to know how to write YAML or Formulas and then asking ChatGPT to provide a solution you can review knowingly without having to do all the typing and error checking for typos. Next we moved on to the collaborative portion of the meeting. Jen had questions regarding HTML and Rich Text buttons. Her main focus of learning right now is verifying or becoming comfortable with the QB formula language and learning HTML. We looked at a button she is working on that changes conditional to another fields value. Tammie stepped in and showed some of the excel to QB cell shading she has developed in the past. In essence, we recognize many Users are moving from Excel to QB to do work. The builder wants to make the UI/UX as inviting as possible to improve the transition, thus we build a lot of complex buttons. Rich Text Formula fields have made it where advanced builders can customize the look and feel of the Realm. By making visual changes to the environment, end-Users feel there is greater value in using the product over Excel which improves adoption. We hope Quickbase decides to improve the Grid Edit experience as development has been stalled in this area for a few years. After we looked at formula rich text and replicating excel in quickbase we moved on to other topics. I talked about the main focus for the past few weeks to re-write a Stored Procedure in SQL (QuNect) that initializes Employee Training data based upon the Employee Job Title. It is a complex multi-layered process Harder has come to rely upon. It works based upon the Employees Title. By knoowing the Title, QuNect adds Training Records (with links to Videos and documentation) to the Employees record so they see recommended trainings all based upon their Title. The reason for the change is previously the Stored Procedure was written using temp tables and CTE's (Common Table Expressions). The goal is to leverage the newish Unique bulk UPSERT feature by creating Surrogate Keys and UPSERTing using the Surrogate instead of Record ID#. Since I am playing with live data, I am being as careful as possible to avoid phone calls, emails and QB Restore tickets. Finally I am developing a baseline template for how to use bulk upserts over older while loops. Another good meeting had come to a close and we agreed it was useful for all. Tammie says she is going to keep showing up, which is awesome! Afterwards Jen, Elena and I headed out to Izakaya Kichinto for some heart warming Sushi and Ramen.0likes0CommentsJune 26th Portland Qrew Meetup 3PM
The Portland Qrew is meeting on the fourth Wednesday at 3PM PST at the Harder Mechanical Contractors offices in Portland, OR. The 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 atjharrison@harder.com and I will send an invitation.0likes0CommentsMay 2024 Notes
Attendees: Tammie King, Lee Gilmore, Diego Alvarez, Jim Harrison Todays Qrew Meetup was virtual and valuable for the United States Qrew in general. We had Tammie King from Boston, MA. on the line allowing us to make a cross country connection; so we focused on Quickbase and Qrew building. The meetup started with introductions and then a general state of Quickbase from the customer perspective. Overall, transparency is important if an organization is interested in Continuous Improvement. Oftentimes individuals make decisions affecting others and do not consider the implications. If Quickbase really believes in Democratizing things and removing Grey work then Quickbase needs to become more transparent in the decision making process. That, I hope sums up the general terms of the conversation. After we chatted about our frustrations, we talked through some Pipelines building and Lee Gilmore was quick in the search to provide a solution to the question of how to concatenate a data cell with a string in a Pipeline Step. As the meetup started to wind down we discussed whats next for Boston Qrew leader Tammie King. Tammie is planning to continue to attend the Portland Qrew meetups and host the Boston Qrew meetup at her organizations offices at the same time. The plan is to bring Boston and Portland together and build structure.0likes0CommentsMay 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