Best practices to use Make Grid

Based on Make Grid's purpose of seeing dependencies, data flow, and overall structure, here are some best practices for using Make Grid to manage your automations effectively:

You can create folders in Make Grid to keep the landscape organized. Each folder in Make Grid represents a specific island.

Use meaningful action-based naming conventions to stay organized. When working on complex projects, especially within a team, your naming conventions are critical for readability and maintenance. While naming a scenario, consider a scenario's purpose, data flow, and potential impact. For example - use Sync new gmail contacts to contacts list, instead of Google sheet - sync contacts. Name individual modules to clearly describe the specific action they perform in the workflow; for example, find users - {email address} instead of Google Sheets - Get values.

Use Make Grid as a pre-migration checklist to identify and isolate dependencies to prevent workflow breaks.

Before replacing any dependency, use the Attributes view to document data fields being consumed by downstream dependencies. This ensures that when you make changes to a dependency, you map each piece of data correctly, ensuring data integrity.

When replacing a core dependency such as a database, use the Links view. This view clearly shows if other, seemingly unrelated scenarios or folders rely on that dependency. This prevents unexpected outages across your entire workspace.

Make Grid is a powerful tool for identifying inefficiencies that consume operations and slow down execution.

When troubleshooting scenarios, use different layers to identify consumption. If the module is pulling large arrays or bundles, you have a bottleneck. The best practice is to always apply filters as early as possible in the scenario chain to reduce the size of the data being processed, saving both time and operations.