My Make Academy Experience
Published: November 10, 2025 • 6 min read
When I told my automation love story, I talked about why I decided to invest my time in learning how to use Make, so I figured I'd write about what the experience was like.
First, unless my memory has chosen to fail me at this time of writing, this is very likely the first tool that I've learned to use by following a structured course provided by the company. For most other tools I have learned to use in the past outside of University, I've taken courses on Udemy or relied on YouTube videos (super grateful for YouTube University). I am glad I chose this method though since I found it rather enjoyable.
The Five Courses
Now there are five official courses in the Make Academy which in order are:
- Make Foundation
- Make Basics
- Make Intermediate
- Make Advanced
- Make AI Automation
I completed the courses between the 1st to the 16th of October. It honestly wouldn't have taken that long if I hadn't fallen sick while taking the Make Advanced course.
My Honest Experience
Now my honest experience with the course. I found the Make Foundation, Make Basics, and Make Intermediate to be really easy to follow along. The concepts were broken down so clearly that I was convinced that the people who built the course did not just keep programmers like me in mind. It was structured in a manner that would have allowed for non-programmers to follow along pretty easily. This, of course, meant that I had different moments of 'Why are they explaining that? Who wouldn't know that?'
But you see, that reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend of mine who didn't study computer science. I don't remember what exactly we were talking about, but I do know that in that conversation, I had used the word 'Array' and she asked, what does that mean? That moment right there is when I learned that the word 'Array' was not in the vocabulary of non-programmers.
However, that was just a side story. As I walked through the courses, they had multiple follow-along exercises which I did follow along with. None of them were super complicated, but I found it was best to follow along to get a feel for the Make interface myself.
When I Stopped Following Along
By the time I got to the Make Advanced courses, I no longer followed along with the exercises. You see, throughout my time in University studying Computer Science, I had semesters where I had to learn multiple new programming languages all in one semester. What this teaches you is that at some point, your learning should be for the sake of knowing or understanding what is possible. Then when the right problems show up, you know what features are available within that application or tool to help you resolve the problem.
So that is what I did with the Make Advanced and Make AI Automation courses. I simply followed along with the courses and paid attention to the functionalities talked about. It is likely that when I am ready to use them, I might have to revisit documentation, but hey, that is basically the life of a developer. We always have to keep revisiting documentation!
What I Didn't Like
Remember when I said above that the course was very detailed and well-structured for even non-programmers to understand how the application works? Well, one of the ways they achieved this is by using several real-life analogies to explain the technical concepts. This was a good strategy, until it wasn't. I found that as I progressed from the beginner courses to the more advanced courses, the analogies confused more than helped me. I had to make conscious effort to not read the analogies to avoid being confused. I can't say objectively that the analogies were bad, but I do know that they were not the best analogies to help me.
Now the second thing I do not like about Make is how the dynamic tokens or mapped fields look. When using Make functions, the semi-colon and brackets appear too large. When writing really long functions or nested functions (which will be necessary especially when trying to manage credits) in Make, the mapped fields make the functions look ugly. There is also no way to format the functions so that they appear aligned and are easier to read, which is especially useful when you have multiple levels of nested functions.
My Favourite Section
You probably guessed already, but yes, it was the Make AI Automation section. You see, one really nice thing about Make is that it gives you the ability to create 3 types of automations:
Traditional Automation
This is what Make and every other similar automation tool like Power Automate, Zapier, and n8n are famous for. You have a manual process with clear step-by-step process and you use these tools to create workflows to automate these tasks. It is deterministic, which means the same inputs will always lead to the same output.
AI Automation
This is just like traditional automation, except it uses generative AI in one or more steps. In version 1.0 of the French Writing Playground, when you submit an entry, an automation process gets kicked off. One of the steps in that process involves making an API call to a webhook scenario in Make, which in turn makes another API call to an OpenAI model to retrieve corrections for the submitted text. This is an AI automation because it involves the use of Generative AI to retrieve the text corrections.
Agentic Automation
This is the coolest of them all. It is when you build workflows that use AI agents. These AI agents are smart enough to make decisions about how a workflow should proceed. This means that you don't have to build a step-by-step workflow which is how the two above work, but you instead have an agent that decides what the best way to solve a problem is based on the inputs it receives.
This type of automation is useful for workflows that are non-deterministic, that means, the same input may not always lead to the same output depending on the context. I am yet to create this sort of automation, but I am thinking of incorporating an Agentic Automation into the HR Hub design project that I am currently working on. I am excited to use it as I believe this is one of the highest levels we have gotten to in terms of working with AI.
Anyways, that is all for today.
Thanks for reading!