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Microsoft Flow - Convert Links to Short URLs with Bit.ly

In my last post, I showed you how to create a Flow that would promote a new blog post on Twitter and LinkedIn. Given the character limits on Twitter, you may run into issues where your tweet has too many characters and your Flow will fail. The quickest way to address that is to convert the link to the blog post into a short URL using the Bit.ly connector.

  • bitly
  • flow
  • power-automate
Monday, November 19, 2018 | 2 minutes Read
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Pivoting Your Career

I recently found myself in the uncomfortable position of having to look for a new job. Thanks to the “alleged” poor life decisions of a certain former leadership person, the company I had poured most of the last four years into was closing its doors. We’d limped along best we could for a time after the “event”, but it was not to be. It was time to put it out of its misery. Those of us that had survived that long suddenly found ourselves with a need to go job hunting.

  • career
  • transition
Saturday, November 17, 2018 | 8 minutes Read
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Embrace Failure

For all of us, there will times, many times, when our efforts end in failure. Sometimes, they will be small failures. And sometimes, they will be spectacular failures. Sometimes, you will be at fault. And sometimes, despite all your best efforts, someone else will be at fault. It doesn’t matter. It’s just another opportunity. Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm. Winston Churchill Recognize The first thing you need to do is recognize there is a failure. A lot of times, this is easy. It smacks you upside the head. Like when your employer goes out of business, for instance. Other times, it’s hard to recognize the failure. We don’t see it. We don’t want to see it. Maybe because it’s too painful to acknowledge.

  • failure
Monday, November 12, 2018 | 5 minutes Read
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My Advice: Finding a Developer Job

Note: This is all my opinion. It has no basis in scientific theory or groundbreaking research on job searches. It is based solely on my own personal experiences hunting for jobs over the years, as well as experiences related to me by other people in the tech community that I know personally. It’s a highly limited subset, being mainly restricted to the central Ohio area. You have been warned. It’s a great time to be in the tech industry in general. Unemployment is down in most areas in the tech sector. You have the advantage. Use it. As with all things, times change. There were times it wasn’t good to be in tech. Those times will likely come again. But for now, you’ve got it good. If you’re not happy where you’re at right now, do something about it. Go and find a new job.

  • change
  • job-search
Wednesday, October 17, 2018 | 21 minutes Read
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Take Time to Breathe - A Few Minutes to Better Code

In a previous blog post, I talked about taking time to unplug in order to avoid burnout. That’s not what this is about. This is about getting in the zone. It’s about those times when you are so deep into the code that you just keep going and going. This is about those times when you get an idea and you dive headlong in and don’t come up for air for hours. Stop it. Stop it right now. Take a step back. Take a moment to breathe.

  • balance
  • burnout
  • productivity
Wednesday, July 11, 2018 | 9 minutes Read
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Using C# and Azure Text Analytics Sentiment Analysis To Respond To Customer Complaints

I’m a dev. I just make apps. I only deal with customers when something breaks and my support teams can’t fix it. They’re just an annoyance, right? Wrong. I’m going to show you how Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics Sentiment Analysis can help you retain customers and look good while you’re doing it. Anyone who has worked in a customer service related field will tell you that it’s far less expensive to keep an existing customer happy than it is to win a new customer to your product or service. This is an unavoidable fact and yet so many companies get it wrong. They put little effort into their existing customers until it is too late. Another fact is that all of these customers have friends and social media accounts of their own. And they will share that experience, be it good or bad, to the detriment or glorious success of your company. One lost existing customer is 100 customers who will never even give your product a try. One mad customer that you’ve made happy and kept around is 10 potentially new customers who will be willing to give you a try. (Yeah, I know, people complain far more than they praise. We’re funny like that.)

  • azure
  • c-sharp
  • dotnet
  • sentiment-analysis
Saturday, June 16, 2018 | 8 minutes Read
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Devs: Are you giving back, or only taking?

A couple of weeks ago I attended my favorite annual developers’ conference: Stir Trek. The reasons I like Stir Trek are many. It’s a fantastically run conference. It’s entirely a volunteer, non-profit effort. Over its history I have only missed two Stir Trek events. This year, as the time for Stir Trek registration approached, I made a decision. I was going to attend, as usual. This time I intended to do something more. The dev community has been good time. I thought it time to give back more.

  • giving
  • javascript-friends
  • stirtrek
Wednesday, May 16, 2018 | 7 minutes Read
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The Problem with StackOverflow/StackExchange

The StackExchange sites are a collection of websites on various topics where people can ask questions and get answers from members of that community. People can also up-vote or down-vote both the questions and the answers, as well as add comments regarding either. People receive ranking points, called “reputation”, for asking questions and on how many up-votes/down-votes their questions and answers receive. It’s intended to drive an active (and interactive) community of people around each subject area. The first and most popular of the sites is StackOverflow.

  • civility
  • gatekeeping
  • inclusivity
  • stackexchange
  • stackoverflow
Thursday, May 3, 2018 | 10 minutes Read
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C# Advent Calendar 2017 - Using C# and Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics to Identify and Relate Text Documents

One of the tasks that developers sometimes face in large companies (or even small ones) is trying to figure out how large sets of data relate to each other. If that data is text based, C# and Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics functions make this extremely easy to accomplish. In this post, I’ll walk through identifying language and parsing out key words and phrases that we can use to help match blocks of text together.

  • azure
  • c-sharp
  • c-advent
  • cognitive-services
  • dotnet
  • text-analytics
Tuesday, December 19, 2017 | 11 minutes Read
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Hey Devs, You Are Not Expected To Know Everything

There was a tweet that entered my timeline yesterday that really caught my attention: If you’re a new programmer I just want you to know, me and all of my colleagues with years of experience Google the most basic things _daily_ Accounting Shower Curtain and Unusual Bedroom (@oliviacpu) December 13, 2017 It seems one of the most basic concepts. Yet it gets completely hidden by the developer community. It doesn’t matter how many years of experience you have in a particular language. There are still things you will have to look up EVERY SINGLE DAY. I really started to think about it. Why are we ashamed to admit that publicly? A couple of reasons came to me pretty quickly: Ego and envy.

  • career
  • development
  • productivity
Thursday, December 14, 2017 | 5 minutes Read
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Mentoring Junior Developers

One of the biggest struggles of the development community is the mentoring, encouragement and development of entry-level and junior developers. A couple of years ago when I was adding people to my team, two of those I hired were women essentially right out of college. I found myself faced with a struggle that many dev managers and leads have faced over the years: How do I encourage, train and develop junior developers? I certainly didn’t want either of them to go through the same struggles I went through. When I was hired out of college, I had both advantages and disadvantages. I was a career changer in my mid-30’s. I had worked for more than a decade in various jobs, so the work mindset was not new to me.

  • mentoring
Friday, December 8, 2017 | 15 minutes Read
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Deploy Database Updates With FluentMigrator and VSTS

One extremely handy open source library for .NET developers is FluentMigrator. This package allows you to script out your database changes as C# classes. The concept is similar to the code first migrations of EntityFramework, but allows you a bit more fine tuned control over deployments and doesn’t tie you to any specific ORM or other database interaction model. For example, it’s easy to control which environments the updates go to with tagging. This can help prevent accidental database updates to production and has already saved me from database restores on a couple of occasions.

  • database
  • deployment
  • fluentmigrator
  • libraries
Thursday, November 30, 2017 | 7 minutes Read
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