On today’s episode, we speak with Tanay Pant – author, speaker, educator and head of developer relations at n8n – an up and coming automation platform that can connect Airtable to hundreds of other apps, and boasts features that Zapier and Integromat lovers will no doubt find impressive. Tanay has been in the technology world for years, and is known for his books “Learning Web-based Virtual Reality”, “Building a Virtual Assistant for Raspberry Pi”, and “Learning Firefox OS Application Development” – all published before the age of 22!

 

Tanay tells us about his diverse use of Airtable – both in his personal and professional life. He explains how Airtable and n8n work together – n8n offers an Airtable “node” with all sorts of options that allow the user to grab one or more records, then pass that data on to subsequent steps in the automation to be manipulated or used with other apps.

 

In the demo portion of today’s episode, Tanay shares two examples with us. The first is an app he built using Airtable, n8n, Typeform, and a product called Mindee that can extract data from an image. Tanay demonstrates how he can quickly and easily snap a picture of a receipt, and have that data flow to Airtable – vastly simplifying and streamlining the process of submitting expense reports.

 

The second demo shows us n8n’s creative use of Airtable as an internal tool to help on the back-end of their site. On a daily basis, the company needs to create JSON files for each application that they integrate with. They use Airtable to store each application name and build the JSON files with a nightly job.

 

Check out the show notes to learn more about n8n and Tanay, or follow him on twitter @Tanay1337.