Re: 👋 Cohort introductions!
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Hello friends!! My name is Dustin and I work on all things customer education-related here at Airtable. :slightly_smiling_face: I’m based out of Seattle :evergreen_tree: and just celebrated my 1 yr Airtable-versary in May.
When it comes to my favorite Airtable feature, I’m a huge sucker for the grouping capability in grid view. As a loooonnnnng time spreadsheet nerd, these seemingly small things that Airtable lets me do with records are completely thrilling in my eyes. The number of times I’ve banged my head against limitations of showing & presenting data in simple ways with other solutions - well you get the idea. I just really love this stuff. 
In my free time I like to search out restaurants in Seattle that serve tater tots so I can keep a running list of who has the best tot offering. I miiiiiight be keeping that list in Airtable. :winking_face: Let me know if you’d like to see it or if you keep your own lists of cool stuff in Airtable.
Excited to be here and get better at Airtable alongside each of you!
-Dustin
Hello everyone - Thank you Airtable Creator Kickstart team for this great opportunity.
First I am so honored to be here.
I started using Airtable in July 2020 as a consultant for virtual event.
I love spreadsheets. Started out with Boeing Calc (if anyone even knows what that is) - Was one of the first QA testers of Excel (before they even had QA testers). Taught several years advance spreadsheet design, did some amazing things in Excel.
Been a bleeding edge technologist in some ways, and a diehard in others. Taught myself RBase for Dos, Filemaker, and a few other Database programs but could never get the system to work the way I wanted. Learned MySQL, but again, too much overhead to create things that were useful and could be expanded.
Over time I still did bleeding edge looking for the pairing - database/project management: Asana, Trello, a couple of other program/project management tools, but again overhead and the lack of cohesion.
Same with Pipedrive/Salesforce - for CRMs. Overhead… learning curves, hard to link stuff, and figure out.
So when I was asked to learn Airtable and help unravel their mess they had made - I sat down one weekend, went through the few tutorials at the time - playing with the system and well unraveled their mess, created a bunch of new views, styles, links and we were able to get through that event managing 80 speakers, 58 hours of programming, 6 tracks and 30 sponsors. I liked I didn’t have to scrap what they had built, just cleaned it up, learned about sync and how to use views/hiding fields, creating forms that had conditions.
I took some Udemy classes on Airtable. But I found them lacking.
Now I am building something to help me and my own business.
I am a crafter/artist.
I create customized greeting cards that are gifts in of themselves, beaded jewelry that is really unique and one of kind pieces, memory books, book markers that are treasures in of themselves…you name it, if it’s paper, bead, or fabric - I work in it and with it. But they are all customized for the client.
I have a lot of crafting supplies (sometimes I refer to myself as a store) which is where my problem starts.
My overhead for me is is the back and forth between me and the client on settling on what supplies, style and design their piece is. I want to be able for them to comfortably be able to look through the designs I have, and what I have made based on conditions/answers from a questionnaire, then show them the options in the inventory to help them craft the basic elements of their gift.
While at the same time I am still able to build add to inventory, CRM, track existing designs/pictures, manage commission projects and provide forms for folks to fill out to start a commission.
I am here to take myself to the next level of Airtable as a designer, utilizing my 35 years of SQA, Tech Writer and Project management in the corporate space and my love for build as you go and use as you build ideology.
Just a sample of my work…
