Posts

Azure Back To School 2022 - Saving Customer Relationships With Azure Cognitive Services

Friday, September 2, 2022 | 1 minute Read

Function Friday - More Date and Time Fun: startOf and dayOf

Previously I’ve walked through how to do some date math, formatting, and parsing. Now I’ll drill into a few of the other date and time functions around getting certain values related to a particular date and time. dayOf Functions There are three functions that are closely related: dayOfMonth, dayOfWeek, dayOfYear. All three function in the same manner. They return a numerical value that represents the particular DateTime’s value in reference to the current month, week, or year.

Friday, September 2, 2022 | 2 minutes Read

An Introduction To Databases

Something a little different this time around. Lately, both at work and in my personal projects and learnings, I’ve been dealing with a wide variety of databases. Databases in general are a core component in application infrastructure. Despite that, they get far less focus in the blogosphere than other topics like UI, UX, APIs, and the like. I get it. Databases aren’t sexy. They aren’t cool. They’re just the core that supports the entire application. Nothing important.

Tuesday, August 30, 2022 | 6 minutes Read

Microsoft Power Automate - Creating Our First Flow

power automate

Tuesday, August 23, 2022 | 1 minute Read

Video: Creating Our First Power Automate Flow

Another introduction video. This one covers an overview of creating a simple flow in Power Automate. https://youtu.be/AFUt1VoNMUc

Tuesday, August 23, 2022 | 1 minute Read

Function Friday - Formatting and Parsing Dates and Times

This week I’m looking at formatting and parsing date and time values in Power Automate. This can be a great pain when working with data in your functions for a straightforward reason: DateTime values come in many different formats. And different systems will require different formats for your DateTime values. And that’s before you even consider the pain of timezones. formatDateTime We’ll first look at formatting. The formatDateTime function takes a DateTime string and converts it into a different format. The pattern is as follows:

Friday, August 19, 2022 | 4 minutes Read

Is a College Degree Necessary To Find A Tech Job?

It used to be that having a college degree was a necessary thing to getting a job in software development. This was especially true at the “entry” level of the spectrum. Oftentimes it didn’t really matter much what that degree was in. It was just “required” that you have one. But is that still the case in 2022? Thankfully, in most cases, the answer is: No. Don’t get me wrong. Some companies still keep a stranglehold on doing things the way they’ve always done them. These companies are collectively known as dinosaurs. They live in the past and they are usually either very big, with a huge bureaucracy (i.e. HR department), or they are owned or run by someone who can’t let go of the past (i.e. an old dude who likes to start stories with “in my day…”). These are the same companies that are currently demanding that developers and engineers return to working onsite in the office, because “reasons”. And in today’s world, these are companies that are struggling to get and keep talent.

Tuesday, August 16, 2022 | 7 minutes Read

Function Friday: Date and Time Addition

This time I’m going to start delving into the date and time functions of Power Automate. Date and time is one of the most painful parts of working with flows. The reason for that is that sometimes a DateTime value is a DateTime, sometimes it’s a number, and sometimes it’s a string. Usually it’s a string… mostly. And it’s hard to know which it is at any given moment. Then add to that plethora of different formats that a DateTime value might take to and from all the various external systems and you have another layer of complexity. And for yet one more level of complexity, we’ll add in the issue of timezones.

Friday, August 12, 2022 | 3 minutes Read

Video - A Brief Introduction to Microsoft Power Automate

This week I’m presenting my first YouTube video: A Brief Introduction to Microsoft Power Automate. Give it a view. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MNnKel_9V8&ab_channel=BarretCodes

Tuesday, August 9, 2022 | 1 minute Read

An Introduction to Microsoft Power Automate

power automate

Friday, August 5, 2022 | 1 minute Read

Function Friday: Data Type Conversion Functions - Arrays, JSON and XML

This time we’re wrapping up the last of the data type conversion functions. We’ll cover the more complex data types: arrays, JSON, and XML. array The array function creates an array from a single input data element. The format is simple: array('<value>') And as an example: array('hello there') // returns ["hello there"] To be honest, there’s no reason to use the array function. The createArray function allows you to pass in multiple data elements and you get the same result.

Friday, August 5, 2022 | 3 minutes Read

Using Application Insights For Better Application Logging

As you gain more experience as a developer, you soon realize the importance of good logging for your applications. When an app is small, you can get away with console logging, print statements, etc. But once your app reaches any real size or functionality, especially as you reach your MVP state, it’s time to have some real logging. For that, we can turn to Application Insights. Application Insights is an Azure cloud-hosted logging platform that you can use to keep track of the performance and errors in your live web apps. As the Microsoft docs put it, you can use App Insights to “automatically detect performance anomalies, diagnose issues, see what users actually do with your apps, and help improve app performance and usability”.

Tuesday, August 2, 2022 | 8 minutes Read