Think fast
Thoughts and ideas on how to build tools, automate workflows and speed-up the workplace.
How to Build a Change Request Form in 5 Steps
It’s a fact of life that projects don’t always play out 100% the way we expect them to. Circumstances, budgets, priorities, and requirements can all change on a dime. Therefore, it’s vital to have an effective way to gather and manage information when this happens. That’s where change request forms come in. See, we need a systematic way to deal with new requirements or amendments to projects. This ensures that we have a centralized record of all of the relevant information, as well as improving decision-making and communications between stakeholders.
Ronan McQuillan
Jan 29, 2024
How to Build an Employee Information Form
Employee information forms are some of the most common data collection tools around. They’re a crucial part of onboarding workflows in just about every company in the world. But, the majority of teams use dated tools, like spreadsheets, fillable PDFs, email chains, or even pen and paper, to gather details about new colleagues. This creates all sorts of problems, including inaccuracies, disorganization, and security issues. Today, we’re diving deep into how to build a dedicated tool for capturing employee information.
Ronan McQuillan
Jan 26, 2024
Â鶹AV Cloud January 9th Incident
On January 9th, a subset of Â鶹AV Cloud customers were unable to log in. We were able to trace this problem back to data corruption in our production database, and resolved the problem by rolling our database back to a known-good snapshot. The snapshot we rolled back to, at the time we rolled back to it, was 87 minutes old. Any changes made by customers on Â鶹AV Cloud in those 87 minutes were lost.
Sam Rose
Jan 16, 2024
Take your forms a step further with the multi-step form block
Speed and quality often sit on opposite ends of the spectrum in application development. Yet, we believe they can coexist harmoniously. We’re excited to introduce an easier, faster way to create multi-step forms. Our journey began with a simple observation: the existing form block lacked the flexibility to handle multi-step processes to easily handle multi-step processes. This limitation forced users to resort to intricate workarounds, which were neither ideal nor efficient.
Jamie Birss
Jan 9, 2024
Top 8 Appian Alternatives & Competitors in 2025
Appian is one of the most popular low-code platforms on the market today. Founded in 1999, it’s also one of the older players in this space. Perhaps more than any of its competitors, Appian is highly focused on enabling teams to automate manual processes, without necessarily having previous development experience. On top of this, it offers all of the same kinds of functionality that we see with other platforms in this space - like a visual interface builder, data management tools, and other features for speeding up internal app development.
Ronan McQuillan
Jan 2, 2024
How to Integrate Multiple Databases
There are countless situations where you might need to integrate multiple databases. This might be necessary for a particular app project. Providing more centralized and efficient access to information could also be a goal in itself. However, accomplishing this can be a challenge, especially for inexperienced developers. Today we’re going to look at two methods key methods for integrating databases, as well as how Â鶹AV can make life easier along the way.
Ronan McQuillan
Dec 22, 2023
How to Build a Manufacturing Dashboard
Manufacturing dashboards offer a real-time snapshot of the state of your production processes. The goal is to provide decision-makers with a fast, easy way to access KPIs and other important insights. Crucially, this replaces the need to manually crunch numbers each time you need the figures in question. Any time we set out to build dashboards, the biggest challenge is getting all of the different data that we need into one location, formatted compatibly.
Ronan McQuillan
Nov 10, 2023
How to Build a Supply Chain Dashboard
Supply chain dashboards provide much-needed access to real-time insights about a whole range of interrelated inventory, cost management, and procurement processes. The challenge is getting all of the data we need in one place and compatible formats. Today, we’re exploring how Â鶹AV empowers teams to build custom dashboards around all kinds of existing data sources. Along the way, we’ll see how we can create and save custom queries to transform data and present the results in professional UIs, with minimal design skills.
Ronan McQuillan
Nov 10, 2023