I was inside a client’s Zapier account doing what I can only describe as archaeological work, trying to understand why their monthly task count had jumped
Author: Olaitan Oladipo
Olaitan Oladipo
Olaitan Oladipo holds a BSc in Sociology from Olabisi Onabanjo University. He is a self-taught automation builder who has spent years inside n8n doing the work that most tutorials skip: debugging OAuth errors at 2am, migrating client automations from Make.com mid-project, fighting reverse proxy misconfigurations on AWS EC2, and figuring out through trial and error what actually holds up in production versus what only looks clean in a demo. He is not a developer by training and not a SaaS founder. He is the person in the Discord server who actually answers the question instead of linking to the docs. His writing on n8n Automation Tutorial covers self-hosting, AI agent workflows, tool comparisons, and the security vulnerabilities the automation industry would rather not discuss. He has built AI-assisted invoice approval flows using OpenAI function calling, connected Claude via HTTP Request nodes, and holds considered opinions about Zapier, Make.com, LangChain, and CrewAI that their marketing teams would not appreciate. He writes for people who are technical enough to follow a tutorial but experienced enough to want the honest version.
The webhook stopped responding at 11pm on a Tuesday, midway through a client demo I had scheduled for 9am the next morning. The n8n instance was up, the wo
For the previous guide in this series, read n8n helm chart: How to deploy n8n in Kubernetes – k3s. Langflow and n8n are both open-source automation tools, but they solve different problems. Langflow is a low-code visual builder for AI agents, RAG pipelines, and LLM applications. n8n is a workflow automation platform that connects 400-plus apps, APIs, and databases into production-ready automations. The core difference is AI-first design versus automation-first architecture. What Is Langflow? Langflow is a free, open-source, low-code visual builder for AI agents and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) applications. Its drag-and-drop interface minimises boilerplate code and supports major…
Deploy n8n on k3s Kubernetes using n8n manifests, create the namespace, verify pods, understand NodePort services, and open the n8n dashboard in your browser.
The first version broke on LinkedIn. Everything else fired correctly — Twitter, Instagram via the Graph API, Facebook Page, YouTube Community, Pinterest, T
The procurement email came through on a Friday afternoon and I almost missed what it actually said. A fintech client, mid-sized, regulated, the kind of com
For the previous guide in this series, read How to Use n8n to Process a PDF File: Build an AI Invoice Approval Workflow. n8n and Google Opal are both workflow automation tools, but they serve different users. Google Opal is a free, no-code AI mini-app builder from Google Labs. n8n is an open-source workflow automation platform built for developers and technical teams. The core difference is simplicity versus control. What Is Google Opal? Google Opal is a no-code AI app builder from Google Labs that converts plain-language descriptions into shareable AI-powered mini-apps. It is available as a free public beta…
The first thing I noticed was the login attempt timestamp. I was reviewing execution logs on a client’s self-hosted n8n instance, a t3.medium on EC2 runnin
The workflow existed before the test did. It was not something I designed to make a point. It was a real client automation I had been maintaining for about
The workflow had been running clean for six weeks. Forty-three nodes, three HTTP Request calls to external APIs, an OpenAI function-calling block in the mi