Howard Van Der Wal

Sr. Customer Support Engineer @ CIQ. Rocky Linux Docs Contributor. CKA-certified.

I have been studying n8n over the past couple of weeks and I am genuinely impressed by how powerful it is. For those unfamiliar, n8n is an open-source workflow automation platform that lets you connect different services, APIs, and AI models together into visual workflows. Think of it as a canvas where you drag and drop nodes, wire them together, and suddenly you have a fully automated pipeline doing real work for you.

The best way I can describe n8n is that it is like having the Infinity Gauntlet that Thanos wields. Each stone represents a different AI model or service, and n8n is the gauntlet that brings them all together. With a single snap (or in this case, a single workflow trigger), you can orchestrate multiple AI services, APIs, and data sources to accomplish things that would otherwise take hours of manual effort. All of the AIs are available to me, connected and ready to work together.

I am currently taking the n8n Zero to Hero course on KodeKloud, which has been a solid structured path through the platform’s capabilities.

What I have built so far

I set up a self-hosted n8n instance and have been building out workflows as I progress through the course. Here is what I have working so far:

  • Email automation - a workflow that handles email sending with conditional logic
  • Google Drive and Sheets integration - connecting Google Workspace services together to automate data flows between Drive and Sheets
  • AI News RSS Feed - an automated workflow that pulls AI news from RSS feeds and processes them
  • HTTP Nodes and API Calls - working with external APIs directly from n8n, which opens up integration with basically any service that has an API
  • Text-to-Image generation - a workflow that takes text prompts and generates images using AI models
  • Text-to-Video generation - similar to the above but generating video content from text prompts

The text-to-image and text-to-video workflows really drove home the Infinity Gauntlet analogy for me. Being able to chain AI models together in a visual workflow, where the output of one becomes the input of another, feels incredibly powerful. You are not limited to a single AI. You can combine them.

What is next

I am continuing through the course and plan to build more complex workflows that combine multiple AI models in sequence. The goal is to create automation pipelines that handle real tasks end-to-end with minimal manual intervention. n8n’s self-hosted nature also means full control over the data flowing through these workflows, which matters when working with anything sensitive.

More posts to come as I progress further.

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