:star: Meet our Community Champion Sam

samliew
Tue, 18 Nov 2025 15:53:31 +0000
News

Hello, I’m Sam

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:

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).

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9 posts - 7 participants