29 Oct : PDX User Group!
Team, Hope all is well! Just thought I'd say hello (still a fairly recent join to the Quick Base family) - friendly reminder of next week's PDX User Group! Even in the time span that I've been a part of QB, it's quite apparent that our Portland Quick Base community is continuing to grow (and rapidly); always a great opportunity to network & collaborate on platform builds/developments! Hope to see you there! ------------------------------ Kory Hoppes ------------------------------
Thanks for coming out! PDX User Group
Great discussion today everybody - thank you! As we talked about, it's often hard to know when to break an app into more than one or many apps. Harrison wrote a great post about this: https://community.quickbase.com/browse/blogs/blogviewer?BlogKey=4d3963dc-2d01-490a-b8b7-b94a4a2bb491&CommunityKey=d860b0f8-6a48-487b-b346-44c47a19a804&tab=blogviewer Thank you @Lee Gilmore for starting off this conversation and lending us your expertise! ------------------------------ Jacob MacIntyre Manager Quick Base Portland OR ------------------------------Monthly Meetup July 26th 3PM @HMC
We have a recurring Meetup planned for the last Wednesday monthly at 3-5PM (Pacific Time). Agenda: Say Hello Presentation(s) Q & A General Discussion and plans for next meeting The location is Harder Mechanical Contractors. There are several parking lots surrounding the building where you can park. Please RSVP so we know to let you in the building. See you all soon! Here is a Google Maps link. 2148 NE Martin Luther King Jr Blvd, Portland, OR 97212 ------------------------------ Jim Harrison transparency = knowledge + understanding : The Scrum Dudes ------------------------------March 2025 PDX Qrew Meetup Notes
We started the March meeting with sharing updates on development progress during the previous month. Jen went first by showing a report designed to track progress and work complete on Jobs. The use case is to provide an easily digestible view for anyone with access to the realm. The report looks really nice and provides a lot of information with links to details. The goal of the report is to replace the spreadsheets used in the past. Next Kennedy updated Notifications sent to customers around warranty information. Seeing how others use the features of Quickbase to perform work is interesting. Jim talked about a Pipeline using the Restful API to get a report from Quickbase and then again using the Restful API to UPSERT changes to the table. The Pipeline takes three steps and uses the batch method in place of loops. He also shared progress on using QuNect to UPSERT to a UNIQUE lookup on a child table. Progress came to a halt when it was discovered that QuNect doesn't allow writing to lookup fields. Prior to a recent change by Quickbase to allow mapping tables using a Unique lookup field, this would have been an error. QuNect correctly made certain the builder didn't attempt to write to a lookup field. Now that writing to a lookup is allowed, QuNect is working on a solution and should have an update next week. Elena shared her work with Fast Field forms. She is building a solution for a customer. One problem was found problem with inserting a string value to a field. There is an option on the Fast Field form builder to insert a string literal. The string isn't written to the cell correctly. The workaround is to add a hidden field to the Fast Field form to take the place of the literal and then upsert that to QB. As we discussed Fast Field we moved into a general discussion of sharing our experience with Fast Field. The general talk about Fast Field includes a brief overview of the upcoming OCR feature. We have some interesting use cases to test out and determine if the Fast Field feature is preferred to the other offerings available in the market. During the conversation, Kennedy asked about Fast Field in general as her company doesn't have access. We gave a brief overview of Fast Field and then went over the features and differences between Fast Field and Quickbase. It seems like Jen has the most production level Fast Field experience amongst the PDX Qrew. Her experience in general is the separation between the two platforms causes duplicate work during development. We all acknowledge that while this integration is only a couple years old, improvements are taking place on a regular basis. As the platforms come together we expect improvements in the integration. As the Fast Field conversation died down, we started talking about the benefits and experience of using AI. We talked about how we use AI to write some code. We also shared our requirements & best practices for using AI. The conversation then moved towards an interesting AI use case. Elena shared a code page for designing a gardening layout planner tool. The page uses the Open AI pipeline channel to fill out record data based upon how the garden is drawn by the User. The Code page is a draggable quadrant like a square celled excel spreadsheet. Users draw a garden plan into the quadrant. Then using a header with drop down lists to define plants, soil type, that are in the selected cells on the quadrant. Next the code page generates values to be inserted into a table in Quickbase. Some of the feature ideas were to include suggestions from AI about plant placement, watering, soil all based upon the plant type in the generated records. The User now has a document with facts about the components of the garden design. It's a neat idea! The problem appears when the amount of data becomes overwhelming to the AI. The code page is generating a json array to send to OpenAI and that is where it seems to not work. The problem with the example is the number of key value pairs became too large and the AI was unable to process the data easily and at a reasonable cost. Good feedback from Jacob is to use the image itself or convert the data values into a series of questions and send the questions to open AI to produce the results. The reasoning is that AI is build upon language and may be more effective/ efficient than sending chunks of data. We all were pretty excited by this observation. The meetup began to wind down and we were beginning to say goodbye when Tammie King appeared in the Teams call. Since Tammie snuck in late, she asked about the cool excel like code page. So we talked about it some more. Again, we all were pretty excited by the garden designer code page. Then we talked about hanging out at Empower and then we called the meeting to a close. Jacob recommended the Pocket Pub as he felt it was nice the last time. While at the Pocket Pub we were witness to a storm front rolling over our heads. The news forecast was for tornadoes, lightening. The weather event was windy for about ten minutes. Some of us got dust blown in our beer before we could cover them with our hands. Then it rained and we continued our conversations.Announcement: Portland Meetup End of July beginning of August
We are going to meetup sometime and somewhere in the range of 7/28-8/4. Wednesdays are a requested day. We are looking for a venue. The venue needs to have a (large enough to fit whoever shows up) quiet room with a computer monitor for presentations. Since we are not certain of the actual commitment/involvement, this is as close to details as we can provide at this time. Please let me know your interest and I will start to work out the details. ------------------------------ Jim Harrison transparency = knowledge + understanding : The Scrum Dudes ------------------------------November 2023 Qrew Meetup Notes
Attendees: Ripley, ElenaL, JenC, JacobM, LeeG, PatW, JimH The Portland Qrew met at Harder Mechanical Contractors Headquarters Wednesday at 3PM. Jacob made an informal presentation on his experiences over the past several months with understanding AI and its value. The presentation began with a survey to the group to gather our level of knowledge and interest in the topic. We stopped throughout the presentation to discuss philosophy of AI, ethics and business concerns. The topics covered by Jacob during the presentation include, different versions or products he has researched, what AI can do and some limitations, security concerns, privacy concerns, the AI overlord and who owns your instance. Finally we looked at how to build a process using actions & pipelines ( which are the same words but different from QuickBase terms and how confusing is that?). The presentation was excellent and stirred ongoing conversation as the evening progressed. After the presentation we headed over to The Pocket Pub for more spirited conversation of AI learning, human learning, Open Source, the future of work and a recommended reading list. It is inspiring to sit and discuss these topics with this group of amazing people. Each month I am amazed at the thought and open minded conversation that takes place. The November Qrew meetup left me with many thoughts that will rumble around in my head over the next month or more. I'm interested to see if researching AI takes any of our group in a different direction or adds another course of action. The biggest takeaway for me at this point is to identify the benefits of leveraging AI to solve most of a problem. I am still going to have to understand the solution or how the solution works or doesn't work, so I can get it to work. I think the point is to get mostly there by leveraging the library of the Internet. At this point, to me what building useful AI means is like an automated Search engine, clean data sets could become a potential commodity. Instead of writing code to make a thing, we'll build the datasets and processes around those datasets that should provide a solution with less researching. Once again a great way to spend the evening with the Portland Qrew. Moving forward, the December Meetup is a collaborative event, so bring your problems and we'll look for solutions together. After hours Book Qlub Patricia wants to Cuddle - Elena 1066 and all That - Jim Sapiens (and sequel Homo Deus) - Jacob Tribe - Elena How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion - Daniel H. Wilson ------------------------------ Jim Harrison transparency = knowledge + understanding : The Scrum Dudes ------------------------------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.November 20th Portland Qrew Meetup
The Portland Qrew Meetup is scheduled for tomorrow, yes I forgot, at 3PM. We have another special guest as Johnathan Miller of Quickbase is visiting Portland and will be in attendance. The plan is to talk about current projects, new changes and challenges. We will finish up the meeting by asking for any collaborative problems to solve and then work together to provide a solution. Anyone will to share is welcome to have a problem solved by a team of very nice people who all love helping. Afterwards I suspect we will go out somewhere. If you would like to join remotely email jharrison@harder.com directly and he will send you a Teams invitation. We do not record or AI these meetings.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.
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About Portland (OR) Qrew
Come meet up with members of the Portland, Oregon Qrew here!Owned by: LeeGilmore, LeeGilmore1, and JimHarrisonCreated: 2 years ago
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