Four Nights with n8n: My Descent into Automation Madness

n8n vs Make.com has dominated my last four sleepless nights, teaching me two valuable lessons: sleep is overrated and curly brackets are evil. Make.com might feel like Lego for beginners, but n8n is the engineering degree nobody warned me about — one that comes with cold dinners, headaches, and the occasional urge to throw my laptop out the window.

Make.com: The Comfort Blanket I Just Outgrew

Don’t get me wrong, Make.com is brilliant for beginners. It’s plug-and-play, it holds your hand, it makes you feel clever without asking for much in return. But after months of using it, I realised I was spending more time fixing processes that randomly died than actually enjoying the magic. Then Gemini updated, and everything collapsed like a badly pitched tent. That was the final straw — subscription cancelled, thank you for your service.

n8n: Where Fun Goes to Die (and Then Gets Really Interesting)

Enter n8n. Everyone on YouTube, TikTok, and LinkedIn Learning swears by it. “This is what the big boys use,” they said. What they failed to mention was that it makes Make.com look like Duplo. n8n doesn’t want to be your friend. It wants you to earn its respect, and it will happily watch you drown in JSON before giving you a hint.

Case in point: my “LinkedIn Guru Post Machine.” On Make.com, it looked neat and tidy (see screenshot one). On n8n? It looks like the wiring diagram of a Soviet submarine (see screenshot two).

What I’ve Learned So Far

• LinkedIn support are excellent at passing you on to someone else.

• LinkedIn’s dev team actually know their stuff.

• Just because you know something technically doesn’t mean it’ll work practically.

• Changing a single curly bracket in n8n will not, in fact, fix your problem — no matter how many times you try.

• Sleep is for the weak.

• Headaches from lack of sleep are not fun.

The LinkedIn Guru Machine

Why call it that? Because LinkedIn is full of “gurus” turning the most mundane tasks into profound sales metaphors. Someone brushes their teeth and suddenly it’s a post about attention to detail and how their company values oral hygiene as much as customer service. Meanwhile, I’m sat here thinking, “No one has ever chosen a supplier because of how passionately they floss.”

So I built a machine that auto-generates this sort of drivel. Partly for fun, partly to learn, and mostly because watching AI churn out guru content makes me laugh so hard I nearly choke on my Coke Zero.

Why I’m Doing This At All

Here’s the thing: I don’t know what I’m doing most days. One minute I’m writing about motorhome park-ups, the next I’m babysitting my grandson, the next I’m deep inside an API rabbit hole at 2am. What I do know is that everything I make — blogs, videos, sarcastic LinkedIn posts — needs to get out there somehow. Automation is my way of keeping up.

Also, AI is the next industrial revolution, and even at 53 I’m not ready to sit it out. I’ve hopefully got another 20–30 years in me, and I’d quite like to spend them doing more than shouting at my laptop. Unless, of course, the T-1000 shows up. Then it’s five years, tops.

Final Thoughts

So if you ever see me post on LinkedIn about how peeling a banana taught me resilience, know this: it wasn’t me. It was the LinkedIn Guru Machine, running on n8n, fuelled by cold dinners and bad decisions.