Posts

Turning Any JSON API Into An App

The Internet is fantastic. There are a seemingly infinite array of APIs available for people to use. Many of them are completely free and open to use in pretty much any way you want to. For example, NASA has a wide variety of things available through its public API. I use one of them in Power Automate with a custom connector to post their daily image to Twitter. For my contribution to this year’s C# Advent, I will demonstrate how easily you can implement any JSON-based API into a C# based application.

Tuesday, December 13, 2022 | 9 minutes Read

Advent of Code 2022

I’m participating in the Advent of Code again this year. We’ll see if I get further than I did last year, which was about halfway before I quit. You can follow my progress in my GitHub repo over here. As usual, my solutions are written in C#.

Wednesday, December 7, 2022 | 1 minute Read

Festive Tech Calendar 2022

By the way, I contributed to this year’s Festive Tech Calendar with a video on how to use low-code automation solutions like Power Automate and IFTTT to automate your holiday season. Check out the video here: There’s a lot of great submissions. Go check them out!

Tuesday, December 6, 2022 | 1 minute Read

Have a Merry Low-Code Holiday

power automate

Sunday, December 4, 2022 | 1 minute Read

Using DALL-E and Power Automate To Create and Share Images

One big current trend, for good or ill, is AI-generated images. There are a number of services out there to generate these images and most of them have an API that you can hit against and which have various price points for that access. For our example today, we’ll use DALL-E 2, from OpenAI. Their introductory level gives you 50 free credits the first month and 15 free credits each month after that. One of the cool features of DALL-E 2 is that in addition to the ability to create new images from text suggestions, you can also upload an existing image and make edits to that based on your suggestions.

Friday, December 2, 2022 | 7 minutes Read

A Day In The Life

Taking some inspiration from my favorite ‘cast this week, Guidance Counselor 2.0, by Taylor Desseyn. I wanted to ‘get real’ a little bit about what it’s really like to be a professional software developer and use this post to delve a bit into the day-to-day life of a dev. A bit of disclaimer first: This is entirely based on my experiences and that of others I am familiar with. That said, there is no single, real answer to the question: What is it like to be a software developer? It literally varies from company to company, position to position, person to person, and even day to day. That’s one of the greatest parts of being a software developer: the variety.

Wednesday, November 30, 2022 | 12 minutes Read

An Overview of SQL Data Types

I have been asked to do more posts on databases, so I’m returning to the world of relational databases this week. I posted an introduction to databases a few months back that you can take a look at for a 10,000-foot view. The next logical step seems to be to take a look at the types of data available across the SQL standard and the more common relational database systems out there.

Tuesday, November 22, 2022 | 7 minutes Read

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