https://ebkac.org/tags/n8n/ Recent content in N8n on EBKAC.ORG Hugo en-gb Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ebkac.org/blog/lernreise-07-tools-and-next/ Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ebkac.org/blog/lernreise-07-tools-and-next/ <p>Every project like this ends with a set of opinions you did not have before. Here are mine.</p> <hr> <p><strong>n8n</strong></p> <p>I will be charitable and say: n8n is excellent for linear workflows of three to five nodes. Trigger, action, done. For anything more complex, it becomes something I would describe, with some restraint, as binary toxic waste.</p> <p>Visual workflow tools have an inherent problem: the visual representation is the code. You cannot refactor it the way you refactor code. You cannot diff it sensibly. You cannot review it in a pull request. When a node is producing wrong output and you need to understand why, you are clicking through a canvas, unfolding nested expressions, reading JavaScript embedded in a UI field that was not designed to hold much JavaScript.</p> https://ebkac.org/blog/lernreise-05-chaos/ Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ebkac.org/blog/lernreise-05-chaos/ <p>By day three, the main workflow had fifty-two nodes.</p> <p>I want you to sit with that number for a moment. Fifty-two nodes in n8n. Conditional branches, error handlers, HTTP request nodes, code nodes with JavaScript doing things that code nodes in a visual workflow tool were never meant to do. Sub-expressions referencing field names from nodes seventeen steps back. The canvas was a tangle of lines that looked, from a distance, like someone had dropped a bowl of spaghetti on a circuit board and decided to ship it.</p> https://ebkac.org/blog/lernreise-04-rag-architecture/ Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ebkac.org/blog/lernreise-04-rag-architecture/ <p>Before touching a single node in n8n, I asked Gemini a sensible question: for this problem, is n8n or Python the better choice?</p> <p>Gemini said n8n, clearly and confidently. It was the right tool for orchestration, it said. Visual workflows, lower barrier, easier to iterate. Perfect for this use case.</p> <p>I want to note this for the record, because it becomes relevant later.</p> <hr> <p>The architecture I had in mind had several parts.</p> https://ebkac.org/blog/lernreise-02-starting-point/ Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ebkac.org/blog/lernreise-02-starting-point/ <p>Six months ago I migrated my homelab. The old machine was a netbook that had served faithfully for years, and by the end of its life it was doing things that its manufacturer had never intended and would probably have considered unkind. I replaced it with a MiniPC: an N150 processor, 16 GB of RAM, a form factor that fits in a drawer. It runs Proxmox. It is fast. It is quiet. I am unreasonably pleased with it.</p>