Stephen Downes

The details of this are useful mostly to OpenEdX users, but the concept generalizes and is worth noting. In a learning management system (LMS) things happen - a person registers, a grade changes, etc. - and this has an impact on external systems or should trigger actions. Most every LMS has a set of notifications - in OpenEdX they're Django signals - that are created when these events happen. Usually the provider writes code to 'wire' them to other systems. This article describes how an automation platform called N8N is used instead to perform the same function. You can try this for yourself, but I would reserve more than a weekend for it.