A Post Contract PowerApp Sabattical

I recently finished a Power Platform project in UK Parliament and in spite of my efforts didn't have a new contract to run into which left me with some time to on my hands as I clip clopped into the sunset.

This is what I got up to in the following week.

On Saturday or Sunday I saw an interesting post by Phil Seamark on the radacad website https://radacad.com/fun-with-dax-minesweeper and.. wait for it.. I thought that PowerApps would be an excellent tool for creating a minesweeper app. To start with I went in a number of different directions as to how to indicate to a user as to how many bombs are located within the vicinity of the selected grid reference, but once I'd cracked that it was quite a bit more straightforward.

Additionally, because of the huge amount of learning that I'd been through putting together a recent competition entry (more on this below), it was no trouble to put together a timer that would lay random bombs. The PowerApps product is so neat that I was also able to add a dramatic heartbeat audio as you get to the last 15 squares. You can find this freely available at PowerApps Bank.

The first day or so was spent trying to make an assessment of the things that I'd learned in my time at Parliament, and I put together a very brief post to this end, but understandably I couldn't say a great deal.

I then went on to make use of Microsoft Planner for the first time. It's a pretty straightforward Kanban board, but a useful way of me arranging the tasks I need to perform.

Tuesday I managed to push out the following vid on using images in PowerApps. I try to keep the vids to 5-6 mins but this was more towards 13 or so, but it's a really important one.

Late on Wednesday I decided to build my website www.dataspinners.co.uk. I'd been holding off for quite a while as I didn't have enough time to devote to it, but as it happened it was a pretty straightforward process and I was most pleased with having been able to pull a few blog posts from earlier in the season onto the blog. The youtube vids were straightforward to pull in as I just needed to pull the embed code and push it into the post and then I was done. I think that this may well be a very useful way of hitting a balance between the video and text. I'll have to work out what the balance is between DataSpinners vs LinkedIn vs https://dynamics365society.uk/, with whom I've been involved.

Whilst all this was going on the hotly anticipated results of the PowerApps game competition were due to come out any time and the TDG guys kept very close guard over the final results. The final 3 were Coin Dog, Marble Math (I still can't work out how they did this) and my very own Million Dreams - the vid below is just an extract of the game. In the real thing you create the house, the tree and the smiley face yourself.

Round about Wednesday/Thursday I started work on a Blockbusters app for my wife (not the videos by the way). She's a French teacher and likes to pit the boys vs the girls in getting across the board either vertically or horizontally.

This is arguably going to be an extremely useful result. By the way my wife had the temerity to put it on her school appraisal document as "using technology to create new resources". Let's be clear the spec went along the following lines. "It would be nice to have a Blockbusters App", but in reality quite often that is all you're going to get. I really like this app, it's highly scalable and focused, the reward is cool at the end as it all starts flashing and the music is the exact music from Blockbusters. The only reason I've not uploaded it to the PowerApps bank is that it actually takes its data from Sharepoint (hence the scalability), so I'd need to play with it to make it transferable. I'm sure I'll get round to it.

Friday was the most interesting day of all. I attended the Thames Valley Chambers of Commerce event on Education, Employment and Skill Summit, held at Hilton Reading. There were a range of speakers from schools, businesses, councils and training providers. Interestingly there was no representation from Reading University which struck me, on reflection, as a little odd.

All of the speakers were deeply passionate about the gap between the skills that businesses need, how Brexit may well result in a skills shortage given how many trades are reliant on labour from overseas. Whilst there was no outright critique of universities, it was apparent to me that these educational establishment are not always tooling up their cohort with the practical skills that they will need in the future. What was extremely interesting was how relevant apprenticeships were to the needs of businesses and the young girl from Moore Stephens (Accountancy Firm, if you didn't know already) spoke very well about the relevance of the skills that she had learned through this route.

Later on I visited my niece at Reading University and we took a look around the campus. I was expecting to be overwhelmed by the efficiency of the University in terms of being able to educate the students, but the nature of the way in which the courses appear to be taught, through lecture and further reading, appeared to be no different to when I was at university 25 or so years ago. Yes, they can access their lecture material online, but it really begs the question as to how relevant it is to be physically present at a university in order to consume the material. It strikes me that the unique selling point has to be that by having students and lecturers in the same physical location it should be a melting pot for new ideas and new developments. If not, you might as well just consume material online and use various forms of social media in order to connect to people that are like-minded.

The other thing that struck me was the cost of being at university. ￡9000 for 6-7 hours a week of lectures with tutorials on top seems rather a lot given that business are arguing that they still don't have the skills required to be effective in business. We popped in the Student Cafe and were charged ￡2.40 for a coffee which seemed to me pretty steep for kids that are are skint already. The whole experience of the day left me wondering about the relevance of university to our children, what it's for and how it improves life for them and for the country, especially when a great many courses have no obvious employment opportunities.

I then sat in rather a lot of traffic on the way home and when I got there picked up on some messages from earlier in the day. Looks like there may be a contract in the offing and they need a gun for hire to chase the varmints out of town, or maybe they just need someone to build some awesome Powerapps, let's hope it's the latter...