Working with Christiaan

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About Christiaan Huizer

Contact me via christiaan@huizer.be

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I've been an active Coda maker since early 2020. Over time a became an expert in blending structured and unstructured data. I create docs for clients as powerful as apps often focused on solving issues related to calculations.

"Setting up calculations"

This is almost always my standard response when asked what I am doing with Coda.

For many years, spreadsheets have been the golden standard for any business. People use Excel and Google sheets for goods reasons as you can read

here⁠

While spreadsheets are great for many things, I prefer using Coda and I wrote about that choice. Writing is what I do often to clarify my own thoughts and to share my knowledge with other Code Makers.

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My trajectory

In any function I worked during my career, I was interested in how to use and improve the data to work with clients, pay-out commissions, to follow-up on partners and their offerings etc. It felt only natural and logical that one day it would become one day my full time occupation. This having said, my work is more than number crunching. It all starts with identifying the problems we want to solve and next finding a way to get there. Spreadsheets have been the power tools of the last decades. Bit by bit we replace them with low code tools like Coda that make much more possible than only calculating.

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When you become a Coda Maker

People tend to start using Coda as of the moment their initial set up falls apart. The WhatsApp group created to communicate quickly becomes a mess. The spreadsheets with all sorts of planning create confusion and even worse, workers forget to show up or show up at the wrong place. Your projects lack overview and get stuck. In the end, you feel the need for change.

I dare to argue that it is good to start with quick & dirty solutions. They not only help out in the short term, they also prepare the road for more robust solutions. The experience along with the frustration often proves to be a rich breeding ground for innovative solutions.

My clients often got stuck before they contacted me, they already know about Coda, tried to figure out some stuff and then realized that in order to move fast and to avoid the same trap as they felt into before, it is better to hire someone who understands how to Coda.

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I am part of Virtual Team

The moment I decided to invest in my skills as coda maker for hire, I felt the need to work together with like-minded people. Building trust takes time, but I am happy to say that over time I found makers working and living in the EU I can relate to, I can rely on. The bond we have permits us to reach out for help and support. For you as client, it implies you deal with me most of the time, but I can ask others for support to solve your problems better and faster than I could have done on my own.

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The work I do

Coding Coda implies not only understanding the Coda Formula Language, but also how Coda as a software functions and what you can do with it. My focus is on:

Complex Business Cases → for example gathering the data you need to fill out a tender fast and accurate based on previous data sets. Instead of making a copy of your spreadsheet, we add rows to tables and filter out the variations we need. It will reduce your time substantially and increase the quality.

HRM & Payroll Management →

keeping track of holiday & vacancies

tracking sick leave

over time (payment)

etc.

Resource planning → Make people and your machines / tools / materials / inventory work together without too much hassle. It ranges from checking a free room in a nearby weekend up to the question how many buses you need in a weekend to replace trains.

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What you need to know

Coda is by far the best Low Code Solution I am aware of, and I have seen and tested quite a few. It is an absolute delight to work in and with. But the best does not mean perfect. I listed a few shortcomings.

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As a potential client, you have to accept these shortcomings. There has been discussion on GDPR due to an “America First Law” that would provide access to all privacy data to the USA government, but that issue seems solved. Still we have to accept that Coda has to make serious steps when it comes to:

Permissions

Partly improved since sept 28, 2022 due to the feature that enables or disables row deletion per page (not per table, but for tables living on the page).

More info here⁠

We are still waiting for improvements related to the

crumble path logic⁠

, not only to avoid info getting deleted, but some info should not be visible at all for users.

Print & PDF

page settings and line breaks,

more info here⁠

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Performance

As you can imagine, I am more than happy to adapt my blog in line with actual and future developments, but today (9/13/2022?) there is not yet enough progression in these areas to rewrite the blog. There are workarounds, but I’d rather stay away from them. I have a strong believe in the engineering capabilities of the coda team.

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My Clients

I work mainly for smaller companies in Belgium and in the Netherlands and for a few USA clients. Planning, Calculations and Permission Management are corner stones in my work. Besides I work on industry specific cases like time table management for bus companies. As one of my clients recently wrote:

Your work was instrumental in getting the company through an important period of growth, so thank you for that!

And I’ll be sure to come to you with future coda projects for other clients (and possibly us ourselves) as they come up!

References on request.

Best, Christiaan

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