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.
