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Microsoft Flow - Convert Links to Short URLs with Bit.ly

In my last post, I showed you how to create a Flow that would promote a new blog post on Twitter and LinkedIn. Given the character limits on Twitter, you may run into issues where your tweet has too many characters and your Flow will fail. The quickest way to address that is to convert the link to the blog post into a short URL using the Bit.ly connector.

  • bitly
  • flow
  • power-automate
Monday, November 19, 2018 | 2 minutes Read
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Pivoting Your Career

I recently found myself in the uncomfortable position of having to look for a new job. Thanks to the “alleged” poor life decisions of a certain former leadership person, the company I had poured most of the last four years into was closing its doors. We’d limped along best we could for a time after the “event”, but it was not to be. It was time to put it out of its misery. Those of us that had survived that long suddenly found ourselves with a need to go job hunting.

  • career
  • transition
Saturday, November 17, 2018 | 8 minutes Read
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Using Microsoft Flow to Promote A New Ghost Blogging Platform Post

UPDATE: I’ve since abandoned Ghost and gone back to WordPress, but the concepts here apply equally and the Flow will actually work without any modifications for WordPress blogs. (NOTE: Posting to Twitter no longer works. Check my YouTube channel for videos on posting to Bluesky and Mastadon) Flow is Microsoft’s answer to IFTTT and Zapier and similar services. These services automate certain online tasks based on various triggers. In the case we’re examining today, we’re going to automate the following requirement:

  • blogging
  • facebook
  • flow
  • linkedin
  • power-automate
  • twitter
Saturday, November 17, 2018 | 7 minutes Read
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Embrace Failure

For all of us, there will times, many times, when our efforts end in failure. Sometimes, they will be small failures. And sometimes, they will be spectacular failures. Sometimes, you will be at fault. And sometimes, despite all your best efforts, someone else will be at fault. It doesn’t matter. It’s just another opportunity. Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm. Winston Churchill Recognize The first thing you need to do is recognize there is a failure. A lot of times, this is easy. It smacks you upside the head. Like when your employer goes out of business, for instance. Other times, it’s hard to recognize the failure. We don’t see it. We don’t want to see it. Maybe because it’s too painful to acknowledge.

  • failure
Monday, November 12, 2018 | 5 minutes Read
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My Advice: Finding a Developer Job

Note: This is all my opinion. It has no basis in scientific theory or groundbreaking research on job searches. It is based solely on my own personal experiences hunting for jobs over the years, as well as experiences related to me by other people in the tech community that I know personally. It’s a highly limited subset, being mainly restricted to the central Ohio area. You have been warned. It’s a great time to be in the tech industry in general. Unemployment is down in most areas in the tech sector. You have the advantage. Use it. As with all things, times change. There were times it wasn’t good to be in tech. Those times will likely come again. But for now, you’ve got it good. If you’re not happy where you’re at right now, do something about it. Go and find a new job.

  • change
  • job-search
Wednesday, October 17, 2018 | 21 minutes Read
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My Favorite Podcasts for 2018

It’s been nearly a year since I listed my favorite podcasts and it’s time for an update. So here’s my favorite podcasts for 2018. There have been a few additions and subtractions. The rest of the list (which I won’t repeat here) remains the same. New Favorites Cross Cutting Concerns This is my favorite new podcast by one of the smartest people I know in the Columbus area, Matt Groves. It’s a generally weekly podcast that covers a broad range of mostly developer focused topics. And the best part is that it comes in a very digestable “drive to work” 20-25 minutes in length.

    Wednesday, August 29, 2018 | 3 minutes Read
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    Take Time to Breathe - A Few Minutes to Better Code

    In a previous blog post, I talked about taking time to unplug in order to avoid burnout. That’s not what this is about. This is about getting in the zone. It’s about those times when you are so deep into the code that you just keep going and going. This is about those times when you get an idea and you dive headlong in and don’t come up for air for hours. Stop it. Stop it right now. Take a step back. Take a moment to breathe.

    • balance
    • burnout
    • productivity
    Wednesday, July 11, 2018 | 9 minutes Read
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    Using C# and Azure Text Analytics Sentiment Analysis To Respond To Customer Complaints

    I’m a dev. I just make apps. I only deal with customers when something breaks and my support teams can’t fix it. They’re just an annoyance, right? Wrong. I’m going to show you how Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics Sentiment Analysis can help you retain customers and look good while you’re doing it. Anyone who has worked in a customer service related field will tell you that it’s far less expensive to keep an existing customer happy than it is to win a new customer to your product or service. This is an unavoidable fact and yet so many companies get it wrong. They put little effort into their existing customers until it is too late. Another fact is that all of these customers have friends and social media accounts of their own. And they will share that experience, be it good or bad, to the detriment or glorious success of your company. One lost existing customer is 100 customers who will never even give your product a try. One mad customer that you’ve made happy and kept around is 10 potentially new customers who will be willing to give you a try. (Yeah, I know, people complain far more than they praise. We’re funny like that.)

    • azure
    • C#
    • dotnet
    • sentiment-analysis
    Saturday, June 16, 2018 | 8 minutes Read
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    Devs: Are you giving back, or only taking?

    A couple of weeks ago I attended my favorite annual developers’ conference: Stir Trek. The reasons I like Stir Trek are many. It’s a fantastically run conference. It’s entirely a volunteer, non-profit effort. Over its history I have only missed two Stir Trek events. This year, as the time for Stir Trek registration approached, I made a decision. I was going to attend, as usual. This time I intended to do something more. The dev community has been good time. I thought it time to give back more.

    • giving
    • javascript-friends
    • stirtrek
    Wednesday, May 16, 2018 | 7 minutes Read
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    The Problem with StackOverflow/StackExchange

    The StackExchange sites are a collection of websites on various topics where people can ask questions and get answers from members of that community. People can also up-vote or down-vote both the questions and the answers, as well as add comments regarding either. People receive ranking points, called “reputation”, for asking questions and on how many up-votes/down-votes their questions and answers receive. It’s intended to drive an active (and interactive) community of people around each subject area. The first and most popular of the sites is StackOverflow.

    • civility
    • gatekeeping
    • inclusivity
    • stackexchange
    • stackoverflow
    Thursday, May 3, 2018 | 10 minutes Read
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    The Mysterious Vanishing Hard Drive

    I was having an issue with the main PC that we use at home. Over the last couple of months, from time to time, one of us wouldn’t be able to log in. It was the famous infamous Windows 10 black screen. When they logged in, a cursor would appear over a black background and then nothing else. The only thing people can say for sure about the black screen of death in Windows 10 is that there are a figurative crap-ton of things that can cause it. It can be anything from video drivers to Microsoft Store corruption. Or it may be failed Windows updates or firmware issues. It has many causes, and no quick solutions.

    • hard-drive
    • troubleshooting
    • windows-10
    Wednesday, February 28, 2018 | 3 minutes Read
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    "Visual Studio debugging - SSL Connection / Connection Reset with IISExpress - Stack Overflow

    Sometimes it can be a huge pain in the rear to work with SSL on local IIS or IIS Express in Visual Studio. I was trying to debug an issue with my authentication flow and just could not get my auth server to run locally. I finally came across this StackOverflow answer and discovered that I was running into the issue where my port for IIS Express was something like 66234. I didn’t know that to get it to work right, you have set the port between 44300 and 44398. And like Jason’s answer, absolutely nothing I could see either during setup or runtime told me that.

    • iis
    • ssl
    • stackoverflow
    Tuesday, February 20, 2018 | 1 minute Read
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