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.Qrew Meetup Notes July 2024
Attendees: Jen Clark, Elena Larabee, Lee Gilmore, Diego Alvarez, Jim Harrison We met at 3PM on the forth Wednesday of July. The only downside was I forgot to renew the Teams invite for Tammie King and she didn't join us. Apolgies Tammie! Moving forward, I have added Tammie to all future Qrew meetups and she has already accepted. Another productive meeting we mainly focused on styling Rich Text Fields. First Diego showed what he made using the Rich Text functions method Jen had shown last month. During the June Qrew meetup, Jen Clark displayed how she uses Quick Base Formula conditions to apply HTML styling to rich text fields. Diego was inspired to create his own conditional styling and this month he showed his work. Diegos field is based upon the values in other fields. Depending on those fields values, the Rich Text field changes color and shows one or more lines of text. The use case then displays the field in a report and provides Users with action items to be completed. As the Action Items are completed the text disappears from the Rich Text field. The field is taking information from multiple fields and condensing it into a single field, meaning the report has fewer columns with the same amount of information. Next Jen had questions regarding using tables in Rich Text Fields. Jen is learning HTML "on the fly" and needed some assistance in the finer details. We reviewed the properties of the table element and covered syntax. We also looked at using App Variables to style the different elements (table, th, tr, td) and she quickly started to add to the Rich Text experience. Within a few minutes the Rich Text field had been transformed from words in a cell to a formatted table with fat red borders; Jen was having fun! We left Jen to her styling and moved on to a problem Elena brought to the table. Elena had questions on formatting a table into a "Safety Cross". She wound up teaching us all a thing or two about using ChatGPT. The styling problem is easy to solve with plenty of reiterative CSS; make a change, update the table, save and reload. Instead Elena chose to use ChatGPT to style the table properties. We learned there are nuances to getting the correct answer. The nuance is in asking the question and modifying parameters and requirements sent to the LLM (Large Language Model) .We still have to know the syntax of the code in order to verify it is properly formatted but all the little changes one makes when styling are handled by ChatGPT. The result in this example is a lot less scanning HTML for mistakes. It is these moments of discovery and sharing that make these meetings so important. Each of us are on our own journey to learning Quickbase development. Together we improve our capabilites. While we were all excited and talking about using ChatGPT I realized the time and called and end to another Qrew meetup. We headed out for some Pocket Pub minus Diego (who is not in Portland) and Elena who had other obligations. Lee, Jen and I continued our conversation around Quickbase as well as other topics.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.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.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.
