Posts

Imposter Syndrome Never Ends - And That's Fine

There’s a ton of feeling in the developer community among new, so-called “junior” developers. It’s something that has come up in many of the mentoring sessions I have held with quite a few people who are new to coding or trying to get into the field. It’s a feeling that you will never be good enough, will never learn all the things you need to learn as a developer, and will never be as good a developer as many of the other devs around you. Many people call it “Imposter Syndrome”. I call it normal.

Tuesday, November 15, 2022 | 7 minutes Read

Function Friday - Chunk, Sort & Reverse

Power Automate has added a number of new expression functions and features recently. This time around I’ll take a look at three of those new functions: chunk, sort and reverse. Chunk The chunk function lets you break up strings or arrays into blocks of equal length. The format is as follows: chunk(<string>, <length>) chunk(<array>, <length>) The first parameter is the string or array you want to break apart. The second parameter is the length you want for each chunk. The result that is returned is an array of chunks. If the array or string doesn’t break apart evenly based on the requested length, the remainder will be in the last array element.

Friday, November 11, 2022 | 2 minutes Read

AI Builder - Creating a Custom Image Recognition Model

Tuesday, November 8, 2022 | 1 minute Read

Video: AI Builder - Creating a Custom Image Recognition Model

This time I take you on a tour of using AI Builder in Power Automate to create a custom image recognition model to identify gaming dice.

Tuesday, November 8, 2022 | 1 minute Read

A Quick Introduction to AI Builder On Power Automate

Saturday, November 5, 2022 | 1 minute Read

Video: An Intro to AI Builder on Power Automate

A new video this week. Bringing a quick introduction to the AI Builder feature on Power Automate.

Tuesday, November 1, 2022 | 1 minute Read

Function Friday - Xpath

Power Automate doesn’t give you any built-in methods for editing XML content, and that’s fine. XML is a devil-spawned file format that should die thousands of deaths and never see the light of day again. But, if you’re forced to use XML and need the ability to search and parse that XML in your flows, then Power Automate provides you a means for doing that search: XPath. The format is simple:

Friday, October 28, 2022 | 2 minutes Read

Error Handling with Power Automate

One of the things in Power Automate that doesn’t seem to get a lot of attention is the available features for error handling. So today we’re going to delve into the kinds of features and design patterns you can use to help your flows run smoothly, even when things go wrong. After Action Failure Branching The most basic feature available is after-action failure branching. Normally a flow passes from trigger to action to action and so forth in a more or less straight line. There are actions such as the condition action that let you take different branches based on some condition. But one of the features of Power Automate lets you use that same concept to take a different pathway based on whether the previous action succeeded (the default) or failed.

Wednesday, October 26, 2022 | 5 minutes Read

Function Friday - Coalesce

I had intended to cover the XML XPath function this week. But due to some time constraints I needed to make this a quick hit this week, so I’m going over the coalesce function instead. The coalesce function is quite simple. You pass in any number of arguments and coalesce returns the first item in that list that isn’t a null value. coalesce(<item1>, <item2>, <item3>, ...) The function looks at each item in the order that they are passed in and whatever the first one that isn’t null is will be your output value. You can pass in variables or static values.

Friday, October 21, 2022 | 1 minute Read

It's Your Time Off... Take It

A quick rant this week. There’s a trend in American workplaces, and it’s terrible. People are taking “time off”, but still working. I can’t even begin to count the number of co-workers I hear who say something to the effect of “I’m out next week, but I’ll still be monitoring emails or joining some calls”. I’m even guilty of doing this on occasion. This isn’t taking time off. If you’re checking email or attending meetings, on your “day off”, you might as well not take time off. There are a couple of reasons why this is the case.

Tuesday, October 18, 2022 | 3 minutes Read

Function Friday - JSON Manipulation

Apologies for the delay. It’s been a rough few weeks lately. A lot of the work we do as developers is to pass data back and forth. Typically these days that data is passed in JSON format (though the usage of XML is still fairly widespread). Sometimes we need to make changes to that data as it passes through. Thankfully, Power Automate provides a few functions to help you work with JSON data.

Friday, October 14, 2022 | 3 minutes Read

Azure Back to School 2022 - Moving Massive Mountains of Magnificent Data

Here’s my second session for Azure Back to School 2022.

Friday, September 16, 2022 | 1 minute Read