Author: Barret

Husband, father, gamer, developer, manager, writer, creative, blogger, model railroader, Buckeyes fan

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

Function Friday – URI Parsing Functions

Sometimes you need to work with URI (uniform resource identifiers) in Power Automate. URIs point at something, like websites, files, and so forth. You should be familiar with their most common format, the URL (uniform resource locator): The first portion (“https”) identifies the protocol or scheme. The second portion (“barretblake.dev”) … Read more

The Employee Right to Privacy

I’ve seen a lot of posts on social media in recent months where people are complaining about their companies spying on them and what they’re doing on their employer-issued equipment and accounts. I want to put this in as plain a statement as possible. ANYTHING you do on employer-issued equipment … Read more