Posts

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

Function Friday - The String IndexOf's

For this week’s #FunctionFriday, I’m going to cover 3 more string functions. This group is related to searching for a particular block of text within a string: indexOf, lastIndexOf, and nthIndexOf. All three of these functions work pretty much the same way. You pass in the text you are searching for and the text you are searching within, and it tells you whether or not if found a match. Let’s start with the base function: indexOf.

Friday, March 18, 2022 | 3 minutes Read

Contributing to the Community

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve taken the opportunity to participate in a number of “coffee chats” with some who are just getting started in the developer community. They come from all over the place: Ohio, North Carolina, Nigeria, Panama, South Africa, India. But they all share a common desire to join the developer community. I’m grateful to be a tiny part of their learning process and I wanted to share just a little bit about my experiences so far.

Tuesday, March 15, 2022 | 7 minutes Read

Function Friday - Add, Sub, Mul, Div

One of the weakest areas for Power Automate’s functions is in the math and numbers area. For this week’s #FunctionFriday, I will delve into the first batch of math-related functions, I’m going to cover the basic 4: add (addition), sub (subtraction), mul (multiplication), and div (division). The pattern is basically the same for all of them: add(5.5, 6) //returns 11.5 sub(5.5, .5) //returns 5.0 mul(3, 3) //returns 9 div(9, 3) //returns 3 You have the function name and then two number parameters. And therein lies the most frustrating part of the functions. You can only pass two parameters. If you need to do math with more than two numbers, you have to call the function multiple times. Like so:

Friday, March 11, 2022 | 3 minutes Read

Function Friday - Concat & Substring

For the first of my #FunctionFriday posts I’m going to focus on a couple of the most common string functions: concat and substring. concat The first function we’ll look at is concat. This function lets you glue together 2 or more other strings into a single string. The syntax is simple: concat(string 1, string 2, string 3) There isn’t a limit on the number of strings you can combine together, but you have to supply at least 2 arguments. These arguments can be any combination of literal strings, string variables, and string outputs from previous actions in the flow.

Friday, March 4, 2022 | 3 minutes Read

Power Automate Connectors: Azure DevOps

One of the many useful connectors available in Power Automate is the connection to Azure DevOps. There is a wide variety of things you can do, including creating and updating tickets, responding to changes in ticket status, or responding to build events or code check-ins. In this post I’ll walk through a couple of examples related to interacting with Azure DevOps. Scenario 1: Creating a work item One of the more useful examples is the ability to quickly create a work item in response to some trigger. In this particular case, we’ll use a Microsoft Form to provide our clients a means of reporting bugs that we’ll use to trigger the creation of a bug in DevOps.

Tuesday, March 1, 2022 | 3 minutes Read