March 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.
