Posts

Slides from CincyDeliver

For those who attended my talk on Soft Skills for Developers at CincyDeliver last Friday, here’s the slide deck. When I get some spare time, I plan to rework the talk a little and record it for YouTube, but that’s a few weeks off. Soft Skills - Cincy Deliver

cincydeliver

Monday, July 31, 2023 | 1 minute Read

Cleveland C#: Effective Application Logging for Maximum Success By Barret Blake

I got to present to the Cleveland C# user group about effective logging for applications.

Friday, June 23, 2023 | 1 minute Read

Resistance is Futile - We Will Add Your Data To Our Own - SciFiDevCon 2023

Monday, May 8, 2023 | 1 minute Read

We're In Some Peril Here: Navigating the Current Tech Job Market

SciFiDevCon 2023 - We’re In Some Peril Here: Navigating the Current Tech Job Market

Monday, May 8, 2023 | 1 minute Read

My Favorite Podcasts & Video Channels for 2023

Every so often I update my list of favorite podcasts and video channels. These are the places I go to for learning and entertainment. It’s especially great to listen to while I’m driving since anymore radio is a desolate wasteland of 40 minutes of ads and 20 minutes of content most hours. But I also like to listen while I code, or work in the garage, or whatever it is that I’m doing at the moment.

Friday, May 5, 2023 | 5 minutes Read

Rockin' the Code World with Me!

Just in case you missed the live interview with me on Rockin’ the Code World, you can watch it below. Get the details here.

Monday, April 24, 2023 | 1 minute Read

Using C# and Power Automate To Sync An Outlook Calendar

There are some good tools out there for syncing your Outlook calendar to other calendars, especially for O365 or Outlook.com calendars. And they’re well worth the money for the good ones. But sometimes, in certain circumstances (such as if you have an on-prem exchange server that you can’t access from the cloud), you just need a quick and dirty tool to copy calendar events from a local Outlook instance to another calendar. That’s something you can do pretty quickly with a little C# and some Power Automate.

Friday, April 14, 2023 | 12 minutes Read

Automatically Adding Travel Time To Your Calendar

Even in this world of video meetings on Teams, Zoom, or wherever, there are still occasions when you need to travel to an onsite meeting somewhere. In these cases, it can be useful to automatically block out travel time before and after to ensure that your calendar reflects when you’re not going to be in the office. Power Automate makes it easy to add some travel time to your calendar.

Friday, March 10, 2023 | 7 minutes Read

MVPbuzzchat with Barret Blake

Here I chatted with Christian Buckley about being an MVP and Power Automate, among other things.

Tuesday, February 28, 2023 | 1 minute Read

My New Job

I haven’t posted in a few weeks, and there’s a reason for that. I recently changed jobs. It was a long journey, and I’ll go in to that here in this post. But the last few weeks were focused on wrapping up my work with my old employer and getting ramped up with my new employer. And with all of the recent layoffs in tech, I thought it might be of some value to others for me to post about my own job search journey. Maybe it will be of some help to you.

Friday, February 17, 2023 | 17 minutes Read

What's The Deal With ChatGPT

ChatGPT is all the rage right now. People are using it for all kinds of things, both good and bad. It seems every day there is a new article or story about it and how people are using it. And most of those stories have a fairly negative connotation to them. A mental health company experimented with using it to respond to patients seeking help. Universities and high schools are freaking out, or giving in, because students are using it to write papers. It even passed (barely) exams from business and law schools.

Tuesday, January 31, 2023 | 11 minutes Read

Creating a Check-in Reminder App

This post was inspired by a recent tweet from Taylor Desseyn. app idea here.... a networking tool where instead of social media/linkedin you plug in a persons info and the app reminds you to check in with folks every 30 days — taylor desseyn (@tdesseyn) December 14, 2022 So what we’re going to do is create a pair of Power Platform tools to help us do exactly that. First, we’re going to need a Power App that we can use to maintain a list of people we want to keep in touch with. The second piece will create a scheduled flow in Power Automate that will run daily, determine who we need to catch up with, and then send us that list of people, along with quick links.

Tuesday, January 10, 2023 | 7 minutes Read