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The Ethics of Being a Software Developer

There’s a lot of pain in the world right now. In nations where freedom exists, the rights and privileges of their citizens are eroding away. The world is changing. Freedom is under attack from every corner and by every means possible, be it war, oppression, apathy, or the destruction of rights by those who have been entrusted to uphold and sustain those rights. As technologists, we have a duty and responsibility to evaluate our roles in those changes.

Wednesday, July 6, 2022 | 11 minutes Read

Function Friday - Collection Functions: Contains, Item, Join

For the last group of collection functions, we’re taking a look at the functions that focus on the items in the collection itself. Contains The contains function details whether or not a collection contains a specific element. The result is a boolean value (true/false). The pattern is as follows: contains('collection', 'value') contains([collection], 'value') The exact way it works depends on what the collection is. If the collection is a string, the contains function works to find a substring of characters.

Friday, June 17, 2022 | 2 minutes Read

My Being Fired/Laid Off Horror Stories

So I saw a tweet in my stream a couple of days ago that got me thinking a bit about my own job history, especially in tech. First “real” job. Mostly research. Acted as office receptionist. I was replaced by a bell. I made the bell business cards on my last day. https://t.co/Jztrw4kEFG — emily freeman 🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@editingemily) June 15, 2022 For the most part, every job I’ve ever left has been on my own terms. It might be for a better opportunity. It might be because I was fed up with the state of the company I was working at. But almost always I left when I decided it was time to go…. with 4 exceptions.

Thursday, June 16, 2022 | 9 minutes Read

Function Friday - Collection Functions: Intersection, Union, Skip, Take

For the second batch of collection functions we’re taking a look at the functions that let you work with the collections themselves. These functions let you slice, dice, and merge one or more collections together. Intersection The intersection function compares two or more collections and returns a new array that contains only the elements that exist in all the passed in collections. The format is as follows: intersection(collection1, collection2, ...) As with all the functions, you can pass in collection variables or literals, and strings are treated as character arrays.

Friday, June 10, 2022 | 3 minutes Read

Function Friday - Collection Functions - First, Last, Empty, Length

Power Automate contains excellent support for working with collections of objects. Generally, these will be treated as arrays of objects. However, these functions will also work with strings as, in Power Automate, strings are also considered a collection, as they are essentially an array of characters. As such, Power Automate contains a good selection of functions for working with these collections. For my return to functions in Power Automate, we’ll take a look at the first group of collection functions: First, last, empty, and length.

Friday, June 3, 2022 | 3 minutes Read

My Favorite Podcasts & Video Channels for 2022

I’ve posted a couple of times (here and here) in the past about my favorite podcasts and I figured it’s past time for an updated list. So here’s my current list of favorite podcasts. And this time I thought I’d add my favorite YouTube video channels. Some are developer-related, and some are not.

Wednesday, June 1, 2022 | 3 minutes Read

Communication: The Missing Skill

Please note for the record that I am not a communications expert. Everything I say here is based on 30 years (20 in tech) of professional experience, nearly half of that in various leadership positions. There’s a giant elephant in the room. It’s huge, enormous even. It’s quite possibly the biggest flaw in the development community. And it really doesn’t get enough attention. Take the following real exchange taken from an email chain:

Wednesday, April 27, 2022 | 9 minutes Read

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Function Friday - More Math

I previously covered some of the base math functions available. This time I’ll cover the math functions that are related to working with arrays of numbers. This includes the max, min, rand, and range functions. max & min These two functions work the exact same way. The max function returns the largest number in an array of numbers, and the min function returns the smallest number in an array of numbers. The format is as follows:

Friday, April 8, 2022 | 2 minutes Read

Easily Create New Bulk Work Items From a Spreadsheet

There are a lot of ways to keep track of work items: Azure DevOps, Trello, Jira, and so on. One thing they all have in common is that it can be tedious to create a bunch of work items at once. It can be a lot easier to just create a huge list of work items in a spreadsheet, especially at the beginning of a project when you’re brainstorming all the various requirements and features to be included.

Tuesday, April 5, 2022 | 6 minutes Read

Function Friday - Slice and Split

This week I’m returning to some of the string manipulation functions: slice and split. slice The slice function is essentially an enhanced version of the substring function. The pattern for the function is as follows: slice(string, startIndex, endIndex) The first parameter is the string to be examined. As always this can be a string literal, a variable, or the output from a previous trigger or action. The second is the startIndex. Unlike the substring function, if the startIndex value is greater than the length of the string, an empty string is returned instead of an error. You can also pass in a negative value for your startIndex. Doing so will count backward from the end of the string and start looking there. For example:

Friday, April 1, 2022 | 3 minutes Read

Copy Events From One Calendar To Another

I recently began offering mentoring sessions for developers who were just getting started in their careers. Calendly offers a great way to allow people to sign up for sessions that fit into my calendar. And while it’s great that it will check two calendars for my availability, it won’t add the event to multiple calendars. But that doesn’t fit into my needs. I wanted the events to be created on my personal Outlook calendar for various reasons, but I also wanted the events added to my work Outlook calendar so I don’t get double-booked with both work and personal events. Power Automate to the rescue once more!

Tuesday, March 29, 2022 | 4 minutes Read

Function Friday - Logical Comparisons

Similar to most programming languages, Power Automate contains a number of logical functions for comparing values. These include: and, equals, greater, greaterOrEquals, if, less, lessOrEquals, not, or. Most of these functions work in the same general manner. The function name is passed two or more parameters. The parameters may be single values or expressions, such as the following: @equals('There', 'Their') //returns false @and(equals('hello', 'goodbye'), equals(1, 2)) //returns false @less(5, 10) //returns true Let’s go through the various functions.

Friday, March 25, 2022 | 3 minutes Read