Power Platform Boost Podcast

Fun and games! (#22)

• Ulrikke Akerbæk and Nick Doelman • Season 1 • Episode 22

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GAME ON! We talk about game development on the Power Platform and if you are a participant at Arctic Cloud Developer Challenge, you don't want to miss this episode. Wink Wink ;) We also talk about Data Activator for Microsoft Fabric, Marc Smith's 30 day mentoring challenge, and Dynamics Hotdish's episode about Rethinking Azure DevOps Practices and Insights with Neil Benson. We finish of by going through which conferences we are going to in the coming months. 


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Ulrikke (00:00)
wink. Is it?

Nick (00:00)
Yeah, and I, yeah, to prepare, like, because I looked at some of these blogs and I, once I watched Scott's video again, so I'm prepared. I am bringing my math textbook, uh, technical mathematics with calculus to, to ACDC. So I'll be all prepared to write a game worthy of Scott Durow and his simple math to solve these problems.

Ulrikke (00:12)
Yeah.

I don't think it's helpful just to bring the book. I think you actually have to open it and read it from end to end.

Nick (00:33)
Oh, it's a six hour plane ride. So I'll probably, I'll be that guy sitting, sitting in the plane reading a math book.

Ulrikke (00:37)
Right. There you go. And then, and you have to, and then you have to pay for extra weight because that thing seems like it wears, good thing you're a weight lifter, a power lifter. So you can actually lift that thing. And then it can go like Scott, like saying, of course, then you do this. And then obviously you do this with your math and then you put this in there and then la la, and then yeah, cause everything's obvious when you're smart as Scott you're also, there you go.

Nick (00:44)
That thing is-

Yes.

It's heavy.

Nick (01:38)
Hello! Hey, Ulrikke, how are you doing today?

Ulrikke (01:40)
Hi! Hi Nick, how are you? I'm

Nick (01:43)
I'm doing well, thanks.

So.

Ulrikke (01:48)
first episode with a new intro and outro and now we don't know whose turn it is to ask the other one how you're doing. Oh this is horrible. Sorry people, how are I'm good Nick thank you. How are you?

Nick (01:52)
Hehehehe

This is an awesome way to start 2024. The what, what the hell are we doing? But that's normal. That's every week.

Ulrikke (02:10)
That's what we do every two weeks, but yeah, that's what we do. It's not pre-baked, this podcast for sure. That's for sure. Oh yeah. Yes, every piece. Absolutely. Oh, maybe that's what we should do. We just asked Chad to give GPT to summarize the week for us. Why don't we think that I think of that before?

Nick (02:18)
Exactly. Not AI generated. This podcast is human made. For sure.

That's actually because that because chat, he uses models that are up to, I think, April 2023. So I do. No, no, I do pay for it. I do have a subscription, but still, I guess, yeah, you could we could dump in all the summer. You know what? I could create an app or power automate to go scourge all the news like RS feeds and everything. The newsletters that we read and all this.

Ulrikke (02:41)
Don't you pay for yours? Does that mean you don't pay for it?

Uh.

Nick (03:01)
pump it into chat GPT and say, create me an episode of the Power Platform Boost podcast. Here's some samplings of both our voices and our faces for video. And then, no, no.

Ulrikke (03:01)
Mm-hmm.

Oh, that's creepy. Uh-uh. I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't know. No, no, I don't want it's too creepy. Sorry. Good idea. I think we just have to make it ourselves each second week. Human made. No, there's actually a service. I just wanted to mention because we do know someone who has that as a

Nick (03:23)
Yeah, human made. So.

Ulrikke (03:37)
Yeah, the

Nick (03:43)
Oh, the digest, yes, absolutely, yes.

Ulrikke (03:45)
Yeah. So if you want that, what Nick said, you can, you can ask the people of, uh, then yeah, the, and get the digest, buy it, buy it, subscribe to it.

Nick (03:55)
Yeah, we'll put that link. It's great. Yeah, it's a great way. It's not sorry. All it's going to give you is the news and updates based on your preferences in a text email format, not in a voice video, creepy AI generated format.

Ulrikke (04:10)
But there is AI involved and you know, if they could upload their voices, then maybe they could do that. Maybe that's a business idea.

Nick (04:13)
Yes.

It could be, it's creepy though.

Ulrikke (04:25)
Yeah, but it's not in our voices. I don't

Yeah, maybe.

All right. Let's dive into the why we're here. Okay. People are not dialing into this just to hear us talk about AI and what we're not going to do. So first item on the list is fabric activator. And I, I read about this a couple of weeks ago. I think I put this in there. So I had to kind of refresh my brain as I usually have to do. And so, and this is slightly out of my, this is not something that I deal with every day is just, I saw this. It's.

preview, and it made so much sense. So to me, this reads, now you can create Power Automate flow kind of actions for Fabric. So this means there's a new low code experience in Microsoft Fabric that automatically take actions when patterns and conditions are detected in your data. So this is a way to monitor your data in Power BI reports, for instance.

If data reaches a certain threshold or matches some patterns, it can automatically take actions appropriately without you. It can also trigger power automate workflows. So this is, if you're in this space and I know, talk to so many people, the Power BI has kind of been always had that limitation where you can look at data, you can analyze and, and that's all good, but there's a limit to what you can do in terms of, you know,

getting at your data, triggering. Now you can trigger Power Automate flows directly, but that's kind of new. So this opens up a whole box of new capabilities in terms of monitoring, but also in terms of triggering other workflows and connecting it directly into Dataverse. So that's one of the things that caught my eye.

Nick (06:15)
That sounds amazing. Yeah, I know very little about fabric I'm learning. I know a bit about Power BI and you're right, it's all about reading the reports, kind of what happens after the fact. And yes, you can have graphs. But again, as someone has to look at those trend lines and let's say like, oh, there's a project that's running out of budget or something, they'll see that graph and they'll have to react to it. Or there's a whole number of, there's an influx of cases flooding our call center.

we now need to act on that. I see if this is going to predict, it's more the system telling you, your budget's running out on the project. This is an alert. Or because of this, we need to consider adding more resources or get you a little bit more proactive on decisions, I think. And I don't know for sure if that's the intention of this or some of the other use cases. But it is amazing how all this stuff's coming together. And of course, Fabric, just because it ties in all these different data sources.

really becomes a great place for that, consolidating that data across your company. And of course, as we're beginning to learn more and more about AI, as I'm learning more about AI, it's a lot of the, if your data quality has to be good for your AI to be good. So I think this all part and parcel ties into that. So that's a great, I see you have the link here that goes back to Microsoft Learn and everything. So that's, yeah, great news item for this week.

Ulrikke (07:28)
Oh yeah.

Yeah, it mentions something called a reflex as well. So it says, I'm reading, a reflex hold all the information necessary to connect to data, monitor for conditions, and act. You create a reflex for each business process or area you're monitoring. So this also kind of ties into something else called a reflex, which, you know, a reflex, right? So something happens, and there's a reflex. So this kind of seems like it's tying together multiple things that are new and coming to a fabric.

And then also, if you are into Fabric and you're in Norway, there's a community event in February called Fabric February, which you need to check out. So just a shout out to those who are interested in that.

Nick (08:25)
That sounds really cool.

Ulrikke (08:27)
Yeah. And, and I caught another thing, um, to this week, which I also found very interesting it's by Ed, which, um, which is power audit, power apps related. Um, there's a, he has a blog post, uh, which shares how to create navigation tabs. So, you know, the, the way you navigate using your phone with the kind of a navigation component, um, he use, uh, collections.

and creates that navigation component and adds which screens to navigate to and the transitions and everything in Canvas apps. And then goes through the basics of how to create that tab list and connect that to the different screens. So it's just one of those low-hanging fruits, really. And it's kind of basic, but still using out-of-the-box and standard components to create something that I think most people are creating in their apps.

And it's really, really helpful. So a great article.

Nick (09:28)
Yeah, it's cool because I mean, we know we've had the tabbed experience in model driven apps forever. And of course, it just but again, it just makes sense in canvas apps as well. We need to be able to select different things. Yeah, no, it's a good that's another it's really and I like these simple concepts and I like this kind of content where people are taking the technology and they're providing like a use case that I think this is something that people could use in all sorts of different projects. And there's a lot of value in that. So.

Yeah, great, great work by E Gregorich and thanks for finding that article as well. So while you're finding all these news articles, I've been spending my time learning a lot of other things. So I've joined something called the 90 Day Mentoring Challenge. And this is delivered by actually Mark Smith and his wife, Megan Smith has evolved with this as well. It's the two of them that are

Ulrikke (10:05)
Yep, definitely.

Nick (10:25)
delivering this now.

Mark's been doing this for quite a few years. I've been aware of it. And we've, I've chatted with Mark about this quite a bit. Every time I have a chat with Mark, I learn something new. I'm constantly pulling out my phone, writing notes. He's a lot of insights and he's a great instructor. He's a great teacher. So, and I've been a lot of people asking me about a career in the Power Platform or career in dynamics and what should I do? What should I learn?

And I've always been, well, you don't get to choose what you work on. Usually you get something assigned to you and that's what you become the expert in. Like this is like, for me, it was like Power Pages. It was like, I didn't pick Power Pages. Power Pages picked me to kind of build up my niche. Yeah, exactly. Or, you know, and some of these other things. Yeah, like, yes, I would love to learn all about fabric but I've not been thrown in a project where someone has told

Ulrikke (10:56)
Hehehehe

Yeah.

Yep, flip of a coin, right?

Nick (11:22)
for example. Anyways, I digress.

Ulrikke (11:23)
Hmm. Yeah. And I think that, you know, no, but, but I think that that's going away because usually it was a one stop shop. If you did something Power Platform, then you needed to be able to do all of it because which usually just you. So you had to learn everything, but nowadays it's impossible to know everything about all the products. So we need to be more consultants on a team. And so then, you know, can't learn everything. It doesn't make sense for you to learn all of it. So, and yeah.

So don't feel bad about that. It's just, I think, evolving.

Nick (11:56)
So going back to the 90 day challenge, the 90 day mentoring challenge, this is something I know Mark has done. And I've always, my perception and my biases, oh, this is for people that are early in career, mid career, they're still learning. And he does, he advertises it as such as you kind of evolving your career in the Power Platform or Microsoft Biz apps, if you, and if you aspire to become an MVP.

or if you aspire to run your own company or if you aspire to work for Microsoft, going through this 90 day mentoring challenge could be something for you. And I'm like, okay, I've done all those things. I've become an MVP. I've had my own company. I've worked for Microsoft. But as I was pointing people towards it, I did reach out to Mark and I said, hey, can I learn something from this? And he's like,

By all means, we love it if you join us in our cohort. This is done by cohorts. It's nothing you can just sign up. There's certain times of the year, I think once per year, but based on the popularity, I'm hoping, asking, hey, Mark, can you maybe do another cohort later this year? Because there's probably, there could be up to 100 folks. I don't know the exact number, but there's quite a few involved and there's like online discussions. And then Mark provides,

content that they release on a weekly basis. Apparently he used to do this live, but he's now pre-recorded, but it's still very interactive. And you learn things about consulting, communication, Biz apps, Mark has a lot of recommended reading from a lot of business books. So overall, there is a cost to us, I think it's like $200 US, which seriously, this course he could easily sell, I think for 2000.

U.S. and it would still be a steal. So if you're up and coming or I think anybody at any point in their career with Microsoft Business Applications, if you feel you want to get better, you want to grow, whether it's in communication or consulting or you maybe want to change your career up a little bit, I highly, highly recommend folks check out the 90-day mentoring challenge. Now we're just in a couple weeks now just getting through it. I'm going through the content. I'm

just to make sure I keep up trying to do some of the homework Mark assigns. Um, so I'll probably, and later episodes kind of report in my progress with this, but, uh, definitely, um, thanks Mark and Megan for, for delivering, creating this content and for everybody else, definitely, definitely check it out, get on the waiting list for the next cohort. I can't, I can't not recommend it high enough.

Ulrikke (14:38)
Yeah. And I think it kind of speaks to, yeah. Yeah. From what you've told me about it is great content. And I can't wish, I can't wait until I have the hours to actually go through something like that, because it was really, it is extensive and you need to make sure you have the time available to get through it, right? So there are weekly meetings. You need to make sure that you have the time. It's not something you can just sign off for.

Nick (14:39)
And Mark has not paid me anything for this plug. It's coming from me directly.

Yes.

Ulrikke (15:04)
and think you'll be able to go through, you need to dedicate some time to it. And that's very good. And

Nick (15:08)
Yeah, I have to carve out time in my to do

Ulrikke (15:16)
All right, so I caught something else this week. I listened to the Dynamics hot dash podcast and they have, so that's run by Ashley Steiner and Eli Nelson and they have Neil Benson, our good friend Neil Benson on the show as a guest and they're talking about rethinking Azure DevOps practices. And from what I can understand, they had a previous episode where Ashley and Eli talks about how they work with.

work in DevOps with developing business applications apps. And, you know, they're sharing their best practices and how it works when they work with it. And from what I could tell, Neil listened to the episode and went, um, sorry girls, but this is not the best practice. This is not the best way to go about this. I have another approach and they, I'm Norwegian, so we don't do conflict. So for me to listen to these three people's, this people disagreeing and having different viewpoints. And.

you know, live on air, I find that, you know, just the fact that they do that very refreshing. And I just love how they kind of the dynamic and the conversation where, so Ashley and Eli will say, so they do work with DevOps the same way that we do in our current project that we are doing together, where you have requirements and you divide the requirements into different tasks and you estimate them. And then you

assign that to the people in the project, and they set up their capacities for each sprint. And then you get the burn down chart, and you get all that granular control and overview of how each sprint is going. And that's the way that Alain and Ashley were using it. And Neil comes along and saying, no, no. That takes way too much time. We don't do tasks. We only do requirements. And we use story points to kind of weigh each requirement and to see how much time that will take.

And then the developer just grabbed the requirement that they want to do and they just do it the best way that they see fit, right? And then the girls go, well, we want to divide, how do you do that when you have multiple resources that work on the same requirement? We use tasks to kind of divide the work between different developers. Well, then you'll go as well, the requirements then, we divide them, we break them up so that they're smaller pieces and we do two weeks sprints.

And then the girls go, well, we estimate to get a feeling of how much time we spend on each task and each requirement to learn for the next project how much time we spend. And then Neil has another viewpoint on how to do that. And it's this great conversation going back and forth and the best practices and how it works and how Neil's used to working with teams that work full time at one project and they're senior developers and they know how to solve things.

But then, you know, Alaa and Ashley work with juniors a lot, like we do. It's much more important to kind of specify how the developers should solve a certain requirement, rather than the senior knowing how to do it. So I actually had a conversation with one of our teammates today about the difference, the difference in the approaches and how it might be a way forward for us. Because we've started with this granular approach.

Nick (18:08)
Mm-hmm.

Ulrikke (18:33)
And maybe now that we're getting into it and now we use DevOps and we're getting used to it, maybe we can switch more to the only using requirements, you know, maybe in the next phase of the project where it's more of a development and maintenance kind of phase than the initial development. So just the one thing that Neil said that really hit home with me is the girls ask, you know, what's the question you get most?

Neil, what is it that people always ask you about after conferences or whenever they get a hold of you? And Neil says, well, it's not what you think. It's not about the size of a project or estimation or anything. It's about how to get sales to sell projects in an agile way. And that hits home with me because that's the struggle that I find. Once we get started with a project, the...

customers usually their mindset is usually already on the requirements and how long it will take and how much effort each requirement is and they have the specification of how it's gonna be solved and they want that It's waterfall. It's sold as a waterfall project and that's really hard to turn that around to an agile way of working so Neil and I and real Neil of course refers to his because he always they also have a lot of

courses about agile approaches and how to work agile with business applications. He has a podcast of his own, of course, customary and the amazing BizEbs podcast that he has. So he refers to that. He has a lot of content around how to train sellers to sell agile. And it's all about trust. You have to get the customer on board and to trust that we know how to solve this the best. Yes, come in with your requirements. And you know, this is...

the amount of people that would work on the project and the customer will decide, you know, the priority of things that they need to get done. But we also, as a leading kind of actor in the project to say what's smart to do first and in which order to do things. But then there's a trust-based system where the customer won't see what each developer did each day because they solve tasks is more of a requirement based approach. I just.

I just wanted to mention that because it's a very educational, very open-minded kind of conversation that I think we'll share with the rest of the team so that we can all kind of get onboarded on the different approaches that you might take to business applications

Nick (21:13)
Cool. Other stuff you found the Santa tracker. Tell us about that.

Ulrikke (21:13)
Oh, me too.

Yes, so absolutely. I, this is David Wyatt and I'm, we kind of mentioned David every podcast episode where he creates so much good content. Um, and how this is about, he created a Power Apps that tracks Santa. And it's of course, as he always does, it's to kind of find out he has a, he wants to learn how to layer images on top of each other into how to use coordinates and to get into those things. So he creates kind of a use case for himself.

Nick (21:25)
Hehehehe

Ulrikke (21:47)
or a challenge, and then he writes a blog post on how he goes about solving it. And I think that's why I keep coming back to Dave's content because he walks us through from his idea and his approach, how he thinks he's gonna solve it. And then he takes us through all the problems and issues he encounters along the way. He will say, oh, so I wanted to layer pictures and I have this problem with the X and Y coordinates and I used a SharePoint list and then this happened. And then I had to do this too.

overcome that issue. And so he kind of, because other blog posts will just show you the solution and then you have to go through and experience all those problems yourself, right? And then he kind of tackles that along the way. I really love his approach to this. So this is just another one of David White's great content. And of course, he also touches on one of my, oh, I think this is my kryptonite time zones.

Can we please just stop? It's not that we can stop with time zones. We just, ah, dates. Also, we had a, we had a rant about this earlier last week as well. I had to ask you in dynamics, I'm creating this timestamp that what time date, time format should I use? Is it the time zone, independent time zone or user local? Ah, I can't rock my head around it.

Nick (22:53)
Yep.

Yeah, yeah, I think yeah, we had that we had that conversation back and forth. So I think this is going to be our boost quest this week, summarizing using the time, the time and date format. So look, look for that. We don't need to kind of rehash this now. We can talk about it next week. But yeah, but with that, I took a look at that link you provided for Dave Wyatt's and read through that. Then I also saw in the side link someone has posted about a

Ulrikke (23:15)
Yeah, I asked you.

Nick (23:37)
top-down 2D game engine proof of concept. I'm just going to bring up the name of the person here. But again, this is funny. Looking at that, the person was MHOPUS Mahopus, which that's their name. I don't think that's their real name, or it could be. Their online persona. But what they showed was they built this top-down 2D game

Ulrikke (23:59)
online persona.

Nick (24:07)
thing. That's funny because in the early 90s in one of my software development courses, I wrote something similar using Visual Basic. And this is kind of based on some of those tile games that used to be in the Commodore 64. And we talked about those types of games before. But I saw this in Power Apps. Yes, back when you were younger. Yeah.

Ulrikke (24:23)
I don't understand a word of what you're saying, but sure.

Toddler.

Nick (24:33)
So looking at this stuff, it looks really cool. Again, what could be done in Power Apps, games and Power Apps. I think that's something in 2024 I definitely wanted finding the time, of course, of everything to get more involved in. But that being said, we also, so this also ties into, oh, there was another one you saw here, the Dungeon Explorer 3000.

Ulrikke (24:39)
Mmm.

Yeah. And also, yeah, sorry.

Yeah, because you put that link in there with the top down 2D game. And so I went in to look at that and then I found another link to someone made a, uh, making a game in Power Apps, Power Push, Dungeon Explorer 3000. It's Chris Kent, the Chris Kent who made that. Uh, and so I'm just seeing all of these games popping up. And we talked about this in a previous episode. I think it's one of our first episodes we talked about the, how to, how you can use games to learn and especially with Power Apps and made me think about

Scott Juro's 3D game in Power Apps. And he's a judge at ACDC this year. So, you know, if you connect the theme of ACDC this year is Super Mario. And Scott Juro is a judge and he made that 3D. It's kind of a first drivers kind of game. Look at me, I'm so Italian. Just kidding. And then, yeah, so if you kind of put two and two together, maybe if you're a 10D...

Nick (25:48)
Hehehe

Ulrikke (25:54)
at ACDC this year, it may be a good idea to look at some of these blog posts to get an idea where to start if you want to use a game, if you want to create a game and canvas apps. Wink, wink. And I can't even do that. Wink, wink, wink.

wink. Is it?

Nick (26:08)
Yeah, and I, yeah, to prepare, like, because I looked at some of these blogs and I, once I watched Scott's video again, so I'm prepared. I am bringing my math textbook, uh, technical mathematics with calculus to, to ACDC. So I'll be all prepared to write a game worthy of Scott Durow and his simple math to solve these problems.

Ulrikke (26:20)
Yeah.

I don't think it's helpful just to bring the book. I think you actually have to open it and read it from end to end.

Nick (26:41)
Oh, it's a six hour plane ride. So I'll probably, I'll be that guy sitting, sitting in the plane reading a math book.

Ulrikke (26:45)
Right. There you go. And then, and you have to, and then you have to pay for extra weight because that thing

seems like it wears, good thing you're a weight lifter, a power lifter. So you can actually lift that thing. And then it can go like Scott, like saying, of course, then you do this. And then obviously you do this with your math and then you put this in there and then la la, and then yeah, cause everything's obvious when you're smart as Scott you're also, there you

Nick (26:52)
That thing is-

Yes.

It's heavy.

Ulrikke (27:12)
go.

Nick (27:13)
Yes, and speaking of ACDC, we're going to be going head-to-head. Now, I think we're going to do boost updates from there. That's when we'll sort of, you know, put the...

Ulrikke (27:18)
Yes, we are. Game on. Going to bring you down.

Did we talk about this? You're announcing this now. We're going to do, do you know, right? You know that this is a three hour, 24 hours a day challenge, right? I'm not going to have time to go out, go out, go off with you and do recaps. Not a chance. If you want to do recaps on me during the ACDS, you have to, you have to give me that time back, you have to help me.

Nick (27:47)
Fair enough, yes. And I can get the help other team badge or something.

Ulrikke (27:50)
We can just put everything at a pause. Everyone's eating lunch and you and I are standing in a quarter during the recaps. How's it going? Are you leading? I'm leading. I'm winning. You'll lose.

Nick (27:54)
Yep.

Yes, perfect. How are you doing this? Oh, how did you do this? Yeah, yeah. We'll see. No, I'm excited about that. It's going to be cool to be a competitor. Yeah, I'm going to be on it. We're going to be on opposite teams or different teams. So it's going to be cool.

Ulrikke (28:11)
Yeah. Do you have an advantage as you were a judge last time? Last year.

Nick (28:17)
Uh, I think understanding how the points are awarded and the categories is definitely not that, not that I wouldn't have got that as a competitor before, but I think that does provide a bit of, yeah, I think it provides an edge just to kind of understand the chaos that judges have to go through the amount of information and just, it was hard. It was a much, much harder job than I thought. I thought, Oh, go in and see what's cool. Whatever. And I went in like, no.

this is, it's tough. You gotta go and you gotta rank. And of course you're talking to the different teams. You gotta remember, okay, what team did this and what team did that? And which team had the blah, blah app? And which team was tying in the GPS coordinates? And I'm like, okay. And it was this, I still have my notebook around here and it's just pages and pages of notes and chicken scratches and numbers and rankings. And I was, I, as much as I love being a judge, I think I'm gonna be much more fun building stuff than.

Ulrikke (28:53)
Hmm

Yeah.

Nick (29:16)
trying to figure out what stuff's better than other stuff.

Ulrikke (29:19)
Yeah. And it's there are 10 teams or more this year and there are six judges. I know it's crazy. We have to put a cap on that I think next year because it's too much for all the judges. They're only human. So, you know, so buckle up Scott. It's going to be a hell of a lot of work.

Nick (29:38)
Yep. Human judged.

Ulrikke (29:42)
But we have judges coming back year after year and wanting to be judged. So I think as much as it's a lot of work, then I think it has to be rewarding somehow because otherwise we wouldn't have people wanting to come back. So definitely. And you're hosting, so I'm on the committee for ACDC, so that's why we keep coming back to it. But you're putting on a show this year as well.

Nick (30:03)
Me and four others, speaking of Scott, Scott's actually on the committee doing everything. Now he's with Microsoft, he has all sorts of extra time in his hands. And Eric Solve, Chris, yeah, almost. With along with Eric Solve, Chris Pizzacchi, Victor Dantas, didn't forget anybody there. So we're on the committee to put together the Canadian Power Platform Summit.

Ulrikke (30:09)
Yes, he is.

Yes. Almost like being unemployed. F***

Just kidding.

Nick (30:32)
which is happening on March 15th and 16th. That's a Friday and a Saturday in Vancouver. Call submissions ends later, I think the end of the week. So get those submissions in. We're now opening. It's up.

Ulrikke (30:44)
and you don't have to do video any longer. I just wanna say that out loud so that other people know, you don't have to do the video any longer, huh? See, and now we can submit three sessions.

Nick (30:52)
It's op, it's-

The video is optional, but it would be helpful just saying.

Ulrikke (31:00)
So if you like to do a selfie video style kind of audition, be, you know, feel free sending the video. But if you dislike it, like some here, then you

Nick (31:09)
Hehe

So, but it's gonna be, it's gonna be cool. We now understand our facilities a little bit better. A person at Microsoft is amazing. She's a pram, she's helping us out with everything. She's kind of almost one of the committee as well. That really makes in terms of organizing the event, having someone kind of on the inside in terms of knows the facilities and things like that makes a huge difference. So it is a ton of work or spending.

more hours a day on this than I feel like I should, meeting with special sponsors and things, working through trying to organize, getting our nonprofit status set up, learning lots there. Anyway, long story short, Canadian Power Platform Summit, check it out. Please, if you're gonna be in the Vancouver area, or if you're an MVP going to MVP Summit, consider staying a couple extra days, come up to Vancouver, check out the event. It's gonna be...

Ulrikke (31:42)
Thanks for watching!

Nick (32:09)
It's going to be kind of on a smaller side this first year, but we're hoping to grow it into something a lot bigger in the years to come. But you could say you were there since day one. So definitely check that out.

Ulrikke (32:20)
Yeah. And we both will be, and then we will do recap from that. Definitely. So yes. And we will also both be at the color cloud in April. Right. So we'll see each other in February and in March and in April. And that's ha ha. Yes.

Nick (32:25)
Yes.

Yes! Yeah.

Yes, Germany. So a short little flight shakeup landing for you, bigger for me.

Ulrikke (32:42)
Hahahaha

Yep. And that's because that's what 17th and 18th of April or something. Yeah.

Nick (32:46)
and a couple other of.

Yes, that's a Thursday and Friday. So I'm doing a pre-day workshop on the Thursday. You're doing a session on the Friday. So I'll be there in the front row chairing you on, getting you coffee or whatever.

Ulrikke (33:05)
Yeah, perfect. And recaps. And you do also May, don't you? You coming over here in May as well, or is this on your side of the world? Dynamics Minds.

Nick (33:16)
No, Dynamics Minds in Slovenia. So that's in later May. And I got two sessions, one's Power Plot for Mythbusters, which is kind of an interactive session, which the crowd will be able to vote on a topic. Let's just say maybe managed versus unmanaged solutions. And then we turn it over to the panel where we need to discuss and debate. And then the crowd gets to decide, is the myth busted or is it?

Ulrikke (33:33)
Oh

Nick (33:45)
Truly a myth.

Ulrikke (33:46)
Can we actually just solve it once and for all? Can we just vote and be in agreement of what is the way to go? Oh!

Nick (33:53)
That's the idea. We're gonna solve all the issues in the MythBuster session. So that way, after that, it's sort of like, oh, should we do this way or this way? Like, no, that myth has been busted, myth busted. So that's the plan. And then the other one was also in May, a little bit actually before Dynamics Minds in Colorado, DynamicsCon. So DynamicsCon is the idea there was,

Ulrikke (33:59)
Fantastic.

Exactly. Yeah. Good luck with that.

I'm sorry.

Mmm.

Nick (34:21)
kind of a business applications conference with kind of a Comic-Con type theme to it. And they started doing online conferences like during the pandemic time. But now they're doing this is DynamicsCon live where it's a live in-person conference. It'd be the first time I go to their live event. I've been on their virtual events. I know some of the team, they're a great group of organizers. So this would be a pretty good conference. So, and.

You're going to laugh. I'm doing my kind of intro to Power Pages session there. But I've renamed it, revamped. I could.

Ulrikke (34:55)
Again, you can do that in your sleep. You need to have this hologram thing and you record it and just put that hologram thing on the floor and then the hologram will do it for you and then you can just kick back and relax and have a few beers.

Nick (35:10)
I could, but it's always different, it's always evolving.

Ulrikke (35:14)
Oh, and I need to mention something because I saw today, speaking of Power Pages and doing the same thing over and over again, I just want to mention for everyone listening that loves Power Pages, Tino Reeb just did a podcast episode that recaps news and updates for Power Pages for the whole of last year. So if you're into Power Pages, which I wanted to mention, if next session on how to get started with Power Pages is for you, then check out Tino Reeb's podcast session.

episode as well.

Nick (35:46)
Yeah, for sure I saw that. He's been doing a lot.

Ulrikke (35:50)
Oh yes, he's been so busy. But he's worked at Microsoft, right?

Nick (35:55)
No, he works for a partner in Germany. Yeah.

Ulrikke (35:56)
Oh, he doesn't? Oh, is he an MVP?

Nick (36:00)
Not

Ulrikke (36:05)
Brace to nomination. I'll race you to nominating. Just kidding. Maybe, but we'll see. You can't, I can't. Huh? Uh, and also, um, we are so way over time. So we're going to wrap this up, uh, and not speak anymore, but, uh, it was, uh, lovely to talk to you as always. I love catching up. It seems like forever because we re record pre recorded the last episode. Um, but we'll be back in two weeks and that will be.

Nick (36:05)
sure where.

I can't nominate anybody. I'm not an MVP or a Microsoft.

Yes.

Yes.

Ulrikke (36:34)
January 24th.

Nick (36:37)
Okay, see you then.

Ulrikke (36:39)
Catch you later, everybody. Bye bye.


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Nick Doelman

Host
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Ulrikke Akerbæk

Host