Jeff Breece

Posts

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?

Personal: One Important Little Loss

Summary: I had the terrible privilege of scheduling gentle in-home euthanasia for a cat I rescued back in my Dallas days yesterday. She was amazing in every way an animal companion can be.

Power Apps: So, About That 'Expand' Function with Dataverse Offline First Mode...

Summary: In Power Apps, the expand function is used to retrieve related data from other tables or entities within the same data source when you query data. This is particularly useful when working with data models that have relationships between entities, such as in a Common Data Service (now called Dataverse) or SharePoint lists. The magic trick that our client, my team, Microsoft, and I faced? Why were these things being randomly fired in a canvas app which caused a nightmare scenario of generic “network errors” seen by our UAT users. This post is the background on the function and a warning to those who adopt the offline first capability with Dataverse with the Power Apps stack.

Hiking: Scioto Trail State Park

Summary: Getting out of the house and putting in some physical activity has been beneficial for me over the course of my life. It was during The Pandemic, however, that I used some of the trip logs I had stashed to find some off the path spots to go out for weekends or short overnights in the Ohio Valley Region. Great Seal State Park, one of my favorites for its low traffic, small footprint campground with a large number of strenuous trails to get lost upon has a nearby sibling which I just checked out last night. This post is about Scioto Trail State Park after doing the short ~3 mile lake loop last night.

Power Apps Test Studio: Some Hard Observations

Summary: The Power Apps Test Studio is, in most cases, a lackluster tool for creating both unit tests and automated UI test cases. Yes, it mimics some of that functionality that other more mature platforms provide, and there is a case to be made for very simple micro apps possibly benefitting from this feature from a checkbox perspective, it’s wholly unuseful for large scale enterprise low code (or “pro code” as we are beginning to call it) applications. Here are my findings and some alternative paths.

Custom Forms: Where Low Code Meets Engineering Practices in Canvas Applications

Summary: Building a container-based form in Power Apps has several advantages over using the out-of-the-box card-based form control. This post breaks down some of the advantages for these while identifying scenarios where the simpler out of the box form control is a decent tool for those jobs as well.

30/60/90 Day Framework

Summary: Took the weekend off in part for the Fourth of July but always for my husband’s birthday. Throguh this downtime I put my home gym back together, spent quality time with my fella, and had some focused conversations with my goals. THis post is about the 30-60-90 day plan I put together toward rebooting my lifestyle post Pandemic in an era of pervasive industrial anxiety. We can choose to live to work, or work to live. It’s time I chose the latter.

A moment of reflection before turning, yet again, forward

Summary: I got a wake-up call during my last health checkup. Evidently working 7 days a week for two solid months in an atmosphere of constant anxiety is not healthy for a fella. So I’m taking a moment to explore how I took the wrong fork during The Pandemic and how I am course correcting.