⭐ Meet our Community Champion Sam

Hello, I’m Sam :waving_hand:

I come from a programming background, and have always been obsessed with automating stuff (I have too many smart home and network devices), reducing repetition, and finding better/faster ways of doing things. However, having multiple projects and applications hosted on different servers made it difficult to manage and scale. That’s what drew me to Make a few years ago.

At that time I wondered, if I am going to spend money to subscribe to a plan, and use Make extensively in future, I might as well invest in some time to “read the manual” to understand what I’m going to be working with and whether it will be suitable for my needs. Hence, I set a personal goal to complete all the Make Academy and Partner Training courses within a month, which I did.

I then found the Make community with users asking questions that mostly went unanswered (a long time ago). I realised that this forum was a great way to practice my newly learnt knowledge from the Make Academy and to apply them to real-world problems that others are facing, and so I began to start helping out by answering questions here.

I’m the person who loves to bridge the gap between “no-code” and “what’s possible”—usually with a bit of Google Apps Script, a server-side application/function hosted on Google Cloud, running JavaScript code, or like a custom app, which leads us to:

:smiling_face_with_sunglasses: Some “Cool” Things I Built

While helping others on the forum, I found others asking about complex tasks (like splitting up text without truncating words, calculating and formatting dates, or using multiple functions or modules that could be simplified with a bit of JavaScript). Hence, I learnt how to build a custom app that uses JavaScript that I coded to solve those tasks. No data is transmitted outside of Make, so the modules run instantaneously. My custom app “Sam’s Toolbox” packages those solutions into single, easy-to-use modules that anyone can install once and use unlimited times.

As the Make community forum grows, I realised I couldn’t be online all the time to answer all the questions. I started being selective due to the limited time I have, and focused on questions that interest me. Towards the end of 2024, I made an RAG chatbot with my entire forum history using Chatbase, to scale my expertise. You can visit “AI Sam” on this specific web page on my website any time, and if it doesn’t solve your question, you can always post your question on this forum with more details (like screenshots).


:globe_with_meridians: Website
:link: LinkedIn

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Really awesome how you’ve used your knowledge to gain more knowledge and as a result produced something that can help everyone else out even more! If that’s not peak productivity and efficiency, I don’t know what is!

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Hi Sam, we chatted trough some post some times. You are the most helpful guy I met in the community :slight_smile:.

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This is so awesome! You’ve always felt like the make guru on all the forum questions, thanks for your community support!

One question: how does your JavaScript supporr compare to the new JavaScript module of make released recently? I’m specifically interested in manipulating large complex JSON objects.

Thank you for sharing. You are for sure a make guru and a champion!!

Congratulations!

I’ve always been impressed by how well-organised and generously shared your knowledge is!

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The “AI Sam” chatbot trained on your forum history is a brilliant meta-solution! Did you run into any challenges with context windows when your forum history got large?

No, that’s because Chatbase handles the RAG (content indexing and context retrieval), so it doesn’t run into context window issues. For more information, see How to Build a RAG Chatbot.

@samliew

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Makes sense. Thanks for the resource link, @samliew.