Every automation follows the same logic: something happens, then something else happens because of it.

Before we start building, it helps to think the way the program itself works: we start with some data, we do something with it, and we get a result.

Three concepts to know:

Trigger – something happens. Someone fills out a form, a post appears in an RSS feed, a timer fires. Any event.

Module – what the process works with. After the trigger, you add modules that carry out the individual tasks.

Bundle – the data package that travels through the entire process and produces the final output.

When you want to automate something, don’t automate for its own sake – the goal is to take an event, run it through a process, and get a concrete result. That way it’s much easier to picture how it will look visually.

The Make interface is not complicated. In the scenario list you see all your processes, statistics, credits used. The free version is more than enough for learning – once you use it for work, it’s worth subscribing.

In Make, these processes are called scenarios. When you download and share one – as I’ll do with you – it’s called a blueprint. You can build them yourself, module by module, or import a ready-made one.

The biggest problem with downloaded blueprints: you don’t understand what’s happening inside them. It’s much better to build them yourself, step by step – because then you’ll be able to handle downloaded ones too.