We All Have To Start Somewhere

As this is the first post, let me drift away from the normal blog structure that I'll stick to and give you a bit more background information about me to help you get inside my mind, and understand my way of thinking.

So far, all of my professional career has been spent in I.T., or Technology and Change as we like to call it at my place of work. It's around 28 or so years and counting, but we all stop counting once you hit double figures!

All of my years have been on the development and configuration side of things, either as a Programmer, Analyst Programmer, Senior Analyst Programmer and, currently, a Senior Solution Engineer.

My work has always been on the bespoke in-house software that the company uses, with the majority of it being either coding or analysis. That's my bread and butter, and what I enjoy, but it's time to stop standing still and time to broaden the horizons.

Like everybody else, the flavour of the month/year/decade is AI and is something that I definitely need to get a deeper knowledge of, along with how it can be used and integrated with. This leads me onto automations and workflows, and how they can be used to not only automate repetitive and mundane tasks, but also to integrate AI to build agents that can help bring in more business to companies.

So, enough background, let's start talking about what we're here for.

I'm going to concentrate on an automation tool called n8n for my first area of learning. there's plenty of other similar tools out there, but reviews have said that, since it's open source, it offers a lot more flexibility and offers integrations with more software.

In one of my Yahoo email accounts, I receive daily emails about AI from a selection of different senders but I rarely have time to read them all on a daily basis. So, if I could somehow automate summarizing the emails, retaining all the important parts, but is both short in length whilst keeping all of the relevant data then it's a two-win situation. I start messing around with n8n and I also can keep up with the latest news and improvements in AI.

Resisting the huge temptation to start building the workflow straight away, the most important part of the creation is the design. We must always design the overall flow in full to fully understand what we have, what we need to do, and what we want the end goal to be.

So, along with finalising the setup of this blog, my time tonight has been to design the overall structure of the workflow in enough detail to be able to configure it, but not in too much detail that I practically configure the workflow.

It's starting to get a bit late now, and I've an early(ish) start in the morning and so I'll just include my design. For my design, I tend to use sticky notes in n8n so that I can not only see the workflow diagrammatically, but the notes can also then be use to document the workflow and explain each step.

So here's the design and I'll crack on with the configuring tomorrow. Notice the night mode colour scheme!