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.April 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.May 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.Qrew 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.June 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 at jharrison@harder.com and I will send an invitation.April 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 invitationMarch 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.August 28th 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 at jharrison@harder.com and I will send a Teams invitation.January 2025 Meetup Notes
Attendees: Kennedy Maxey, Esther LaVielle, Nico Cantillo, Jen Clark, Daniel Jeon a Denver Quickbase builder 12-14 years, Elena Larabee & Jim Harrison We held the January Monthly Qrew meetup a week early as planned last month. Next month we go back to the regular fourth Wednesday schedule. The meeting started with Introductions. A new attendee Daniel Jeon joined us remotely from Denver, CO. Daniel has several years of experience with Quickbase. We are excited to hear what insights he has to share. Everyone had a chance to say hello to Daniel and give a brief introduction as well. Once the introductions were complete we moved on to asking if there were collaboration questions from the group. Collaboration: Jen asked about anyone's experience with setting up Single Sign On using Microsoft Active Directory. The example showed her login process takes three clicks and doesn't keep the login active once the browser is closed. Several commented there are some settings in the Admin console and Quickbase Support may have to make some changes on their end as well. She is planning to contact Quickbase Support. Nico Showed an App he built this past month around the management of stringing tennis rackets. The design is to keep track of materials, cost and time spent on each racket. During the presentation Kennedy asked about the Document Template. Nico explained how he is using Document Template to print forms. Kennedy looked and doesn't have access to the Document Template since her Realm is not on the plan that offers the Document Template feature. We suggested either a Builder Account, make a test, show it off and see if there is budget or Nico is going to see if Quickbase can turn it on so she can test it out. Daniel asked about Webhooks. He wanted to know if they are "really" going away. Nico responded that yes Webhooks are going away as Quickbase wants traffic going through Pipelines and not Webhooks. I pointed out that Webhooks are going away from the UI and moving forward will be managed via API. There is still a lot of work to be done before Pipelines is ready to replace Webhooks. We then talked about Zapier, Workato and Pipelines. Daniel has experience using Zapier and I asked about the experience since we use mainly Workato. He said the UI/UX is more feature dense than Pipelines, there is a Dev and Production environment for example. Next Jen asked about ideas for building a tool management system. The idea in essence is Users fill a shopping cart with Tools and then check them out. As the checkout process happens quantities are updated in an inventory table. Elena has the most experience with inventory management and building tools in Quickbase. She mentioned using a Code page. We talked about using code pages and Quickbase API to get records from a Query and then add the template new records to another table as well as update the quantity values. This is all possible with a firm understanding of JavaScript. Pipelines is also an option but doesn't provide a live real time experience for the Users. We talked more about Code pages, service accounts and performance tools. The last question came from Jen regarding a new Pipeline process. The idea is getting the most recent files from a SharePoint folder. We looked at several examples of the file structure and the recommendation came up to use Bucket. I have an example I can share but it has been a while so we decided to hold off and look at it again at the next meeting Jen is available. We arrived at the end of our meeting and said our fair wells until next time.September Portland Qrew Meetup Notes
September Portland Qrew meeting started at 3 PM PST on a beautiful fall day. Attendees were Lee Gilmore, Jonathan Miller, Jen Clarke, Jim Harrison. Elena Larabee and a couple last minute invites Jonathan thought would benefit from the experience (KennedyM (Wyoming/Montana), Ender (Denver Co)). In the end the last minute invites didn't make it but I wanted to make note of the invitation to track how this develops. After saying our hello's and introductions, then finding there were no collaboration problems to solve, we reviewed the past months progress. Starting with Lee explaining how he is working on last minute projects, trying to finish something for a customer, and so a little distracted. Having children who attend PPS we are well aware of in-service days where there is no school and Lee was attending remotely. Lee said he will be at next months meeting if all goes to plan. Jen talked about making preparations to building out a Mobile solution. Part of the month was spent comparing Quickbase versus FastField Forms on the iPad. It sounded like the conclusion is FastField is the path forward. Licenses are purchased and they started to learn the FastField UI. The project goal is to provide field representatives with the ability to enter work orders electronically. It's exciting to hear about the development of an electronic, wireless data entry and processing system custom built to the company's specifications. The amount of design that must go into what sounds like a simple project can be overwhelming. We are looking forward to hearing what Jen discovers and are standing by ready to assist and be awed at the design ingenuity. Elena talked about efforts with trying to move data between Domains. In this example, an iFrame in a QB Dashboard that opens an O365 scheduling tool ~ sort of what Tammie was working on previously. When a User clicks the scheduler, the Scheduler page is supposed to open. Instead there is an error because of a security feature in the browser to disable cross site scripting. Aside; for a while Website builders could steer Users away from one Website and to another Website. The method eventually was used to steer Users to nefarious Websites where data loss could happen. Browser builders put a stop to Cross Site Scripting and named it CORS and the Internet moved on. We talked about the inherent problems and shared the limited understanding we have of leveraging Oauth and other security methods to solve the problem. This problem is another of those "sounds easy" until you try it challenges most developers come across regularly. When Elena comes up with a working solution, we look forward to hearing how it was solved and taking notes. Elena also started on the path to discovering Jira www.atlassian.com a project management tool and is still in the early stages of determining how it's supposed to work. Next I shared my progress in the past month. My main focus has been updating stored procedures that use QuNect to sync data between different services in the environment. As is normal with managing data synchronization, there are always requests to add another field to the sync so some other process can be built out for some reason. My method when making these changes is to review field comments, and update notes as needed or where lacking. Over time it is much easier to manage complex systems if there are bread crumbs of knowledge. Also this month we had an amazing opportunity to bring together a large group of Users at Harder and talk about how they use the systems we have built. We called it the "PRIME Improvement Team" event. The event was 3 days of talking about PRIME (our custom Quickbase solution) and listening to our Users. The event was well received by all attendees with requests for more and a lot of new work for the development team based upon the conversation. Finally I shared my experience with the new Quickbase Support Website and gave a rundown on the plus deltas. We wound down the meeting talking about Forms, new style vs old style and form rules in general. Basically with old forms it was nice to have all the fields in a list to manipulate and a pita to manage form rules. We touched on the challenges to transitioning over to new forms. The difference in performance between the old and new forms (old forms are faster). Finally we discussed working and collaborating with development teams . When working with a team of developers there is an extra layer of responsibility amongst the team to ensure all are aware of standards and what everyone is doing. Having daily standups in an open blameless environment is critical to ensuring the team is comfortable working together. It is easy to go into your cave and only come out for food and bathroom breaks. Taking time on a daily basis to share with the team engenders creativity and collaboration. Finally Jonathan Miller, who is a new Quickbase employee and first time attendee, gave some plus deltas of the meeting. He volunteered to be the note taker (thank you) and wanted to invite more Quickbase builders to the meeting. It is impressive to see the level of professionalism Jonathan brings to the table and we are looking forward to working together moving forward. Below is my BMW 1979 R65 per a request from Jonathan. Looking East from the hills on the East side of Salem, OR.
