Learning n8n

Chapter 2. From Separate Apps to a Connected System

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At the end of the last chapter, you traced one piece of information through your morning and found something a little uncomfortable: you are the integration layer. The email came in, you read it, you turned it into a calendar event, you mentioned it to a colleague, and every one of those handoffs happened because you carried it across. Your inbox didn’t tell your calendar. Your calendar didn’t tell your notes. You did, by hand, all day.

This chapter is about why that happens, and what it takes to change it. The short version is that your tools were built as islands. Each one is good at its own job and mostly blind to the others. The good news, and the whole point of what follows, is that those islands already have docks. There are standard, well-worn ways for software to talk to other software, and you have been benefiting from them for years without knowing the words. Once you can see those connections, your tools stop being a pile of separate apps and start looking like what they actually are: a set ...