If you have any suggestions on what else can be added, please let me know in the comments. We all know what it’s like to learn a new tool, so let’s make sure newcomers have a smooth onboarding experience. Share your best insights, tips, and tricks, and I’ll make sure to add them to the post. Thanks in advance!
Don’t have an opinion on how different subjects should be introducted but rather on the explaining process.
It may seem obvious, but having a use-case to tell about would be awesome in order to make the link between all those parts. An example of what I’m talking about is the way the Odoo company made its releases videos always around a wood company that sells furnitures. Thanks to the image of a fictionous business, they can show the different part of the ERP.
In the same way, it’ll be be great to explain Baserow like you’re a young and joyful entrepreneur that wants to manage a SaaS company called UpperColumn (yeah I know the pun is miserable) and has first to deal with listing features of the software (grid view for table Feature), then gather feedback (form view for table Feedbacks) and analyse them (grid view of Feedbacks filtered on good/bad opinions). Final step could be communicate those informations to an an external system like GitHub or GitLab (each time a feature row is created, it creates a row on GitLab/GitHub)
That’s an amazing idea @dynnammo, thanks for your input
Currently, I have in the pipeline one video where we want to show how to use Baserow for a specific use case — managing a marketing project. But it’s indeed a very good idea to show how Baserow can be used for different projects and workflows within one company. I’ll take inspiration from the example you shared
The thing I did that was most helpful when starting out was get lost.
Not in the snarky way, but rather: literally get lost in the platform. Click around. Try to break stuff. Write a crazy formula.
Also: now that we have tons of templates, dissect the formula fields to see how the data interacts within the databases. It’s helpful in not only understanding how something is done, but also helpful in sparking ideas for new formulas and creative uses of Baserow.
Combine it with the API to integrate and automate some stuff, and you’ve got something powerful in your hands.
Yep, that is the best way to start. When you get lucky you could break some stuff and discover a bug. Most developers are always happy when their software gets tested and bugs are found.
I tested a lot of software over the years, not just my own but especially other peoples software, and sometimes I got the question why I did the things I did and discovered a bug. My answer was always the same, because I could.
Sometimes when you write software you could develop a tunnel vision. You know where to click and where not. So it is always good to have fresh pair of eyes looking upon your work.
The first thing you discover after logging in is just the UI. The UI alone already gave me the confidence that I was dealing with quality open source software. Then I started clicking just as @HiramFromTheChi talked about, just to find out really quickly what’s inside. Tested some templates, tried importing, exporting, made a view, did some filtering, sorting, deleting. Made test tables with a lot of content, much more then I will ever need to test the strength of Baserow.
After that I started looking at the API, tried to understand how it worked. Then I started to make my first serious project, still hoping that Baserow would be stabel enough.
In the meantime I was also testing another Airtable alternative but that proofed to be unstable and I lost my testdata. With Baserow I never had that problem. I used the version hosted by Baserow, I used the selfhosted version and now my Baserow is inside Cloudron so to speak. Still the same quality software with no problems. I am lucky my son is doing all the hosting for me else I would still be using the Baserow hosted version.
And please take your time to discover how Baserow works. At the moment I use the things I need but there are still things to discover when need be.
