Posts
Navigating Loss and Friendship: Nick's Story
[Originally published in 2017 after my close friend Nick’s stroke, this post reflects on 37 years of friendship, loss, and recovery. Now, in 2024, I share it as a memorial for Nick, whose journey shaped my life and whose passing marks the end of an era.]
2017 has brought with it so many opportunities for me to grow as a man, a professional, a lover and as a friend. And yet it was August 29th, when Eddie and I got calls from the hospital and police regarding our friend Nick, that I got the biggest challenge of them all. Nick, my friend of over 28 years, first person I ever had an adult relationship with and my constant compass along life’s paths and voice of reason fell. Nick suffered a hemorrhagic stroke on the way home from the grocery store. CCTV shows that he was not discovered until upwards of an hour where he was rushed to the James hospital. His survival and recovery have been nothing short of miraculous. This post is an effort to collect my thoughts enough to send out an update because every time I take a moment to write about him I end up crying. Tonight, is no different but it’s time to start accepting the fact that Nick’s life is going to be dramatically reduced while we all wait to see what the next 10 months look like during his one year recovery window.
Update (2025-09-12): Post-Migration Deep Dive & Lessons Learned
After publishing this walkthrough I hit a harder wall than expected when moving a large Logic App from Consumption to Standard. This update documents what actually went wrong, what looked like a connector API “version” issue (but wasn’t), and the practical remediation paths depending on how much refactoring you’re willing to take on.
[Disclaimer: I used AI to generate this post from code scenarios I personally constructed & very careful contextual guidance in order to document this topic quickly].
A grateful reflection to end the week: A TripTik
Summary: There have been three big chapters in my career after my foundational days spent in Dallas: Cardinal Solutions, Nationwide Insurance, and Insight. Now, after six months at T. Marzetti, today I find myself thinking back on Insight with a deep sense of gratitude. This post is about taking a moment to reflect on an, at times, uncomfortable set of challenges, and then realizing that it was exactly what you wanted… if not more because it makes you who you were meant to be.
New year, new laptop, new solutions to build!
Summary: I’m about five months into my new job and loving every bit of it. It’s putting the strengths I honed both at Nationwide and between Cardinal-Insight. This post is a bit of nostalgia for my old “frankenputer,” as my mom used to say about the machines I would strap together from scrap parts. This last one? An aging AMD 5 core that got me through my last year at Nationwide and then the much tech heavier years at Insight through the Pandmic and afterwards. What follows in this blog is the comparison of my machines and a quick bash script I threw together to setup just the tooling I needed to do both my day job, and all of the other nerdy stuff I work with to, well, chase data rabbits and continue my lifelong path as a learner.
Collaborative Planning and Scoping, a Roadmap
Summary: Communication is important for many reasons beyond just the “technical” or “business” problem. When you open the doors between all the folks involved instead of shielding some from others, the team has a chance to understand how a participant feels emotionally about a given issue, component build, or deliverable feature. Often these are lost to hierarchical organizational structures, to the detriment of all—whether it be cost overruns, the wrong thing being manifested, or too much, too little, or just plain off-base due to bias tipping the scales.
Metadata-Driven Application Architecture & PowerApps
Summary: This post is the completion of the one I wrote on using Atomic Design in the architecture of web based forms, specifically Power Platform Canvas applications. The idea is to create a metadata structure that defines business objects in a data repo that loads upon application initialization. One of the benefits of this is for scenarios where you have multiple buiness definitions for the same process but not all of them clearly outlined as of yet. Instead of blocking the project, you can simply lead with what you have and move immediately forward. Stated another way, it decouples your engineering effort from the business rules while allowing the rules to evolve over time without furhter build time. Low touch, high value.
Moondock Project Architecture
Summary: A few years back, when I was leaving Nationwide and returning to coding for Insight, I fell into a group of UX’ers who were looking for a design challenge to host. Being a part of that process was truly enlightening. Taking three teams, building a pitch around a central idea, camping systems was the idea I proferred, which is where my little passion project “moondock” came from. It’s just an open source thing I’ve been building in my free time using a collection of technologies to mainly keep my skills sharp and, on a good day, help me to understand new concepts like AI models and new cloud concepts that I had not yet had the chance to work with. Of course, my .Net and Bot Framework body of work helped propel this with momentum after recovering from the burnout of The Pandemic era. The funny thing is, that’s actually taking shape now and I even have a pretty robust reserveration checking system that I have integrated with over the weekend as a main service for the build.
Changing Internet Service- with a bit of data to back it up
I finally pulled the plug now that AT&T Internet Air came out. I threw together a Python script and some visuals on a Cron schedule to get some comparison speeds over time. All I have to say is, I apologize to anyone who had to sit through a meeting with me over Teams on my old network connection.
Moving on From Insight & Doing a 5+ Year Self Retro
Summary: Tomorrow is my last day at Insight. This is my self-retro for my nearly six years as an Azure engineer, a team lead, a technical pre-sales solution architect, and a Power Platform Developer/Application architect.
Personal: Take Time to Recharge
Summary: So what happens when we take time to work on life balance?