Inside Notion: Developer Mode, Design & AI with Randy Hunt
Inside Notion: Developer Mode, Design & AI with Randy Hunt was an "After Dark" community session hosted by the NotionSG community at Lorong AI, bringing Singapore's builders, consultants, founders, and creators together to explore Notion's Developer Platform: Workers, Syncs, Tools, and AI. The evening ran a tight agenda: Nicholas Lui on the evolution of Notion, my own talk on Workers at Work.Flowers, Jesslyn Sim on AI and the future of consulting work, and a Q&A with Randy Hunt moderated by Mikie Lee. I delivered the "Workers at Work.Flowers" segment, a practical walkthrough of how I use Notion Workers to pull real data into Notion and turn it into dashboards teams and investors actually trust.
What I covered
- What a Sync Worker is: a small program that pulls data from any API on a schedule and writes it into a Notion database.
- The "Worker + Dashboard = Soulmates" pattern: Workers pull the data on a schedule; dashboards turn it into something you'd happily show an investor, a boss, or a client.
- Worker 1, Unified Marketing Performance Dashboard: two hourly Workers syncing GA4 report data into a Website Analytics database via the GA4 API, using a full TRUNCATE + INSERT each run to avoid duplicates, with charts surfaced on the marketing page.
- Worker 2, Notion to Google Workspace Contact Sync: a Native Automation webhook fires a Worker when a meeting note is added; it extracts the title and metadata, matches Google Calendar events and attendees, then links or creates records in our Contacts database and patches the notes back into Notion.
- A side-by-side comparison of Notion Workers vs Zapier, and why Workers win on cost and on keeping data queryable for Notion AI.
- The new default stack: Sync Workers (pull), Notion databases (hold), Notion Dashboards (surface), Notion AI (reason).
Key takeaways
- Notion handles the infrastructure, and coding agents can write the Worker code for you.
- Synced databases keep data accurate and read-only while still letting you add properties, filter, sort and group.
- Workers are billed on CPU compute (cents per month), and the public beta is live on Business and Enterprise plans, with usage-based pricing only kicking in from 11 August.
Outcome
- Closed by inviting people to my weekly Office Hours (Thursdays 8:30–9:30pm SGT on LinkedIn) and the NotionSG community, and shared the GA4 Notion Sync and Meeting Notes DB Workers GitHub repos.