Power Platform Boost Podcast

AI Slop and Click Bait (#91)

• Season 1 • Episode 91

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0:00 | 40:35

Stop Using AI Headshots

Ulrikke

And also, again, why use AI to create your pictures for you? Because it doesn't know how to do you. I've told you. We called out this dude and you were on the podcast. It doesn't do you, dude. When are you gonna get it? It doesn't look like you at all.

SPEAKER_00

What you are you talking about. Are you talking about the the thumbnail that I did or what you could did?

Ulrikke

No, you. The blog post feature that you did is a slop because it doesn't look like you. And yeah, I'm not having it. It's just nope.

Nick

Okay. I did another, I did another post this week, so I'll go back to the I'll go back to the real photos and staging everything.

Ulrikke

I tried my best to get it to remove the blue kind of thing that exactly that in your glasses. It just doesn't come. It does something wrong with your eyes. It can't do it. I've tried enough to know that it's not going to be able to do it. So just stop it already.

Nick

We're

Summer Delays And Internet Reality

Nick

recording now. How are you?

SPEAKER_02

I'm good. How are you?

Nick

I'm good. We are a day or two late, but that's okay. It's summertime. So no one's in a rush for this, I don't think. The inbox isn't totally flooded with people demanding where this week's episode is yet.

Ulrikke

Not yet. Which is uh good and sad at the same time. I kind of wish that we would kind of notice that we're two days late, but then also it's good to say that people are not dependent on us and that they are maybe checked out uh summer holiday-ish, especially the people on our side of the world.

Nick

Yeah, let's blame it on that.

Ulrikke

Yeah, it's summertime, it's okay. But yeah, so your car broke down.

Nick

Yes. I was camping, I went, I was traveling around, I was kind of on a on a journey camping with some friends, which is really good. It was uh it's it's good to kind of check in with your friends that you've had since I was like a teenager, basically. And and then it was all good, and then I went to visit my sister, and then uh in my hometown, my truck broke down. It was just weird, turned the key, nothing would start, just not even a turnover. Just so random and weird. So thankfully the garage in town was able to get me fixed up on the road about a day later, though. So, but I had a really good visit with my family, uh, which was uh which is probably good as well. And so these are the types of things that happen, but uh I'm I could have easily been broken down in the middle of backcountry Ontario. I could have been broken down in my friend's property, which is way in the bush, or even in the middle of the highway somewhere. So, all things considered, like this is this is what life is all about. It's all an adventure, and you never really know what's gonna happen, and you just gotta roll with it sometimes. And that's partially the reason why we're a day or two late on this, because we made a few attempts to record this podcast early. Internet, it was just so weird. Internet at my my sister's place. Of course, they have I would say regular internet that every probably everybody else has, but of course, you and I, we have more high-speed internet.

Ulrikke

And yeah, we kind of realized there were special people with special internet needs.

Nick

And then I I tried to do it at my friend's place who I was visiting, and uh her internet at first when I did the speed test, they're like, Okay, awesome, we're good to go. And it was so glitchy, it kept dropping every minute. It was like, what's going on? Like, even I was doing Duolingo and it was like, you know, timing out on me. It's like, wow, what's going on?

Ulrikke

So yeah, so we do require, and then of course, my kids are now one kid is on a constant, like from day from morning till night group FaceTime call with his friends, and the other one's playing Minecraft. So there's a bit of demand on my my Wi-Fi as well, even though it should be okay. So uh, but we'll try to push through and uh get through the news for you guys so that you are up to date when you get back to work. Because I think you know, this episode we're gonna try to get it out the door as quickly as possible. But it's of course right in time for you to get back to work. So this is good. You'll get a bit of catch up with what's happened while you've been away if you were on holiday.

Nick

Yeah. And uh does it look like has there been any news? Anything been happening

News Queue Kicks Off

Nick

in the world of the power platform and others?

Ulrikke

There has been a few updates. I must say we have a list of people that have been a bit creative over the uh holidays as well, which is always good to see. People get a bit of uh time on their hands and a bit of downtime in the evenings, and then they crack out a few games or a bit of uh creative work, so that's always cool. And also we have a few people that kind of show up on this podcast week after week. Um, do you want to start off with the first one on our list?

Vibe Coding Versus Agentic CRM

Nick

Yeah, for sure. So our good friend Steve Mordew, and this is actually one of the benefits of being late with the podcast because this article came out this morning and it's kind of that thought-provoking question, call it's the the title is why not code your own CRM? And now we've been talking, ranting, going down a rabbit hole on the Sask Sasok Sask apocalypse. And and then there was an interesting article that Steve referred to that I we may have mentioned last time, but I'm maybe not. But how a company had come out and they said they replaced their six-figure Salesforce subscription per month by basically vibe coding a replacement in-house that was way better. So, of course, that kind of begs.

Ulrikke

Do you is it vibe coding though? It's a gentic AI. Yeah, it's yeah, yeah, right. So let's try to because there's a bit of difference between a developer using an AI to create something and vibe coding something. So I hope that they didn't vibe code a new CRM system.

Nick

Yeah, and and maybe let's just I think because this is an important point you bring up, and I think and thank you for bringing that up because we do see a lot of people vibe code, and then of course, there's the folks that kind of look down, well, you just vibe coded that. Well, yes, there's two things where you're just blatantly like prompting engagement, go build me an app or build me a game or build me something, blah, blah, blah. And you just there you go, and you sit back, and while it generates, it will generate, and of course, it's going to generate software for you, but you know, all the questions that come up is it secure, is it efficient, is it performant? What's the back end? What's all of these things? And if you can't answer those questions, well, now you have a vibe-coded app, essentially. But with agentic coding, which is something that I'm a big fan of, you're working almost working with the AI tooling as what I like as a peer programmer, or maybe you're telling a junior programmer, you're planning things out. Like I like in Cloud Code, there's the plan mode where you do / plan. Here's the software I want to build, and it breaks out the plan. And even if you're using the Dataverse skills, okay, we're going to create these dataverse tables, we're going to create these views, these forms, you know, and even get to the point where here's the automation we want to do and break it all out. And then you go through, and a lot of that tedious stuff of creating tables and creating forms is taken care of. But you, as a solution architect, as the human in the loop, you're controlling the whole thing and you're built, you're understanding how the code works, you're evaluating the security. Of course, using AI as a tool the whole time to be more efficient, and this is how I've been working, and it's been great. But you you can pull out any code that I've worked with AI in the last few months, and I can tell you exactly what it's doing and why we did it that way. I also do a trick where, or trick or something. I've instructed my agents, if I'm building code, to maintain a change log of what was changed and what the decision was. And I found even in that change log, if I have to go back a few weeks and refactor something, we still have a log of what was done in an MD file. And that's that's really good too. So zeroing back on this article, that yeah, we're assuming that this company did, you know, and this is what part of Steve's point was in his article as well. This company could get away with it because if they're already spending six figures per month on a sales for subscription, they have the resources on their internal IT staff to actually go through and agentically build a CRM system in terms of collecting the requirements from the end users, making sure it's secure, making sure it's properly deployed. So his point being is why doesn't everybody just vibe code or bycode or agentically build their own CRM system? Well, you might not have the resources to do that. If you're a very small business with only a handful of people, you can't afford to let somebody sit down and try to build out a piece of software. You know, potentially, you know, obviously there's some apps you could build and things that you can help your own business, but for something like a CRM system or an accounting system, there's a lot of moving pieces there. So you're at this point, his point was being you're almost better off to actually buy an actual package system off the shelf that has been configured and designed and engineered specifically for your purposes. So I think there's a tipping off point there of what your investment is and sort of what you're gonna get out of it. So is it worth is it is the ROI there for you to even agentically build something when something already exists off the shelf? And we see that a lot where there's two sides to it, right? There's the hmm, why am I paying for this subscription when I can build something myself? Great. But or why are you spending all this time building something when something already exists? And I think that's really the core point of what Steve is trying to put there. So that's just it's an interesting ongoing discussion. Like I'm a big fan of, of course, the great thing about the Power Platform is it is a platform to build unique line of business software, but sometimes there's standards and things like that. I use QuickBooks, I would not vibe code my own accounting system because there's so many implications in there around like taxing and how to do proper accounting and things like that. I don't have that expertise. Yes, I could get an agent to build me something, but it's not gonna be it's not gonna be good enough. So that's why I rely on a company like Intuit to build my accounting software for me.

Ulrikke

Yeah. And it's like you said, you need the expertise, the industry expertise. We also need to know the uh, you know, development as a you need to have the proper testing and have all those scaffoldings in place to know what you're doing for it to make sense. And uh, because what you're doing is you're owning the liability, right? You buy a SaaS off the shelf, then you outsource the development, you outsource the security, you outsource the maintainability, all the things you outsource is someone else, meaning they're liable if something happens. If you vibe coded it yourself, something happens. It's it's also been something I've been seeing quite a lot recently in social media as well. Who's accountable? When someone vibe coded something or genetically created something with agents, if something goes wrong, well then it's on you, the developer. You didn't check the code. Well then is that really, you know, it's it's been mentioned for a lot of things. When AI make a mistake, who's responsible? Is it the person that created the model? Is it the creator of the agent? Is it the skill? Is it the plugin? Is it the instruction? Is it the prompt? Is it where's the mistake? Who owns the mistake and who's accountable? You by code a whole CRM system, something's off, who's responsible, right? So it's a multifaceted question with a multifaceted answer, I think. But yeah, it's uh thought provoking by Steve as usual,

Power Apps Native Mobile Clues

Ulrikke

which is good. Makes us think absolutely something else I wanted to mention was the the new, and this is also a bit new, it hasn't been fully announced yet. So it's my maybe a little sneak peek. We talked about it last time as well, but the native mobile app uh we saw a post from Jan Klibeck this last week, I think, on like then where he discovered where it shows up. So it shows up in the new not the new, sorry, let me bring the post up. So it's it shows up in the PowerPlatform skills from the GitHub repository with the MCP server. It shows up as a dedicated Power Apps mobile preview app in the Apple App Store for testing native applications. It shows up in the, you know, when you have a solution in PowerPlatform, and you can add existing types. And if you want to see something before it's released, look in the list of the things you can add to a solution. There's a lot of juicy things in there you can see that kind of is coming that you can suddenly add an existing native mobile app to your solution. Uh and also NPM packages on Microsoft-Power Apps native host. So there's a few signs of what and and also what this is is it's a new line of apps in Power Apps, a new type of Power App, if you like that is designed for iPads and i and iPhones and Androids. It does compile. So there's I saw there was an app store compiler, an NPM package, and the GitHub template skills kind of list that links to that from his post. And then this is a new code first mobile application thing, which allows you to then have a mobile app on the phone, not through that Power Apps starter container app, but as a standalone thing that can then interact with camera and da da da. We talked about this last time. So this is a link for you to go in and check out if you want to learn more about that.

Nick

Yeah, awesome. Yes. And and speaking of uh, yeah, it was kind of the the the worst kept secret, I think, in terms of these new things, uh, just because there's so many hints there.

Data Pilot Tools For Dataverse

Nick

Uh, I found something which I found like kind of blew me away. It's something, it's a new Chrome extension, and I did see a post as well that it is available now on Edge as well, but it's called Data Pilot. And you kind of look at it, okay, Data Pilot, what is that? And it says your cockpit for Dataverse. And I don't know if you've had a chance to look at this thing, but it is amazing. It's got 40 plus tools built into a browser, and you can do all sorts of things like uh, oh, it's got like a data explorer. Uh, you can actually help you document your your power apps. You can add uh there's a prompt library in there, there's dev tool belts so it can you know generate Fetch XML, JSON XML. Like it's got a lot of the tools that we've had, like not all of them, but a certain subset of these tools that we've had in the XM toolbox, but built within a browser extension. And I'm not sure how this guy found the time to build all of this stuff. And I reached out to him because I because I I think I saw it and I commented on and he reached out to me and we kind of chatted a little bit about it. And it's just it's just freaking amazing this thing. So definitely check it out if you're building anything than Dataverse or model-driven apps. I think it has some tools for flow, it has some tools for for different like yeah, there's like 40 some different tools here. I'm just looking through it now, and different tools depending on whether you're even as a maker or sorry, as an end user, it provides some extra tools for that as to like things like record counters and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, check check that out. Uh and it's it is something that's pretty neat.

Ulrikke

Also, I saw something from a guy called Payam. Oh, this is hard. Payam Sadsky, would you say? Sadsky.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ulrikke

Yadeski? Sorry. But we

Power Pages Copilot Versus Cloud Code

Ulrikke

yeah. Yeah, but it was yeah. But it's cool. I mean, it's uh it's uh the the blog is post is called Can Cog Co Become Your PowerPages Development Assistant? And it's trying to compare, you know, the inline with the studio editor you get a side co-pilot to create power pages sites with. I don't think it's and it's comparing that to call code with the skill to create power pages sites. It's like trying to compare, I don't know what, a bicycle to an airplane.

Nick

Yeah, yeah, like a cigarette lighter to a flamethrower, basically.

Ulrikke

Yeah, something like that.

Nick

Pick your analogy.

Ulrikke

So he quickly comes to the realization that those are two completely different things. And the side panel copilot thing is kind of useless and actually doesn't know. I think the biggest issue that he found, which is also the saddest part, is that it can't, it doesn't know more about power pages than the cloud than Cloud Co does. Cloud Code actually knows more about power pages than the sidecar thing does, yeah. Or the side panel thing. And also it doesn't con it doesn't understand your project like cloud code in a project would. So it doesn't uh remember you from session to session, doesn't remember the project, what you're doing, doesn't read through the code as cloud code will do. So he's comparing it to download creating a site, downloading it, and then ha using cloud code to work on the project and also having a cloud md file, of course, with the project. And he's said, you know, it deploys that with the portal so that actually if someone else downloads that code sometime, they the agent will automatically find the cloud.md file and understand the project, what was done, a bit of documentation and and how it's gone about doing its work, which is great. And then it's a bit sad that uh the in-built-in thing isn't as good. But that's I mean, that's just the nature of this at this stage, I think it goes for a lot of things.

Nick

Yeah, that'll the old side the side panel cloud code stuff, or sorry, co-pilot was you realize that's like a year and a half old. So that's like ancient technology in the AI world for starters.

Ulrikke

But but couldn't you kind of expect Microsoft to keep up with these things? I mean, if they expect us to use their tooling, they should keep it up to date, maybe.

Nick

Well, but the thing is the whole the whole idea of the side panels and the co-pilot stuff is was sort of the initial first wave, I think, on this. But then they, as they developed, they realized more and more people are working within the context of whether it's a Visual Studio Code or some of these other tools or even GitHub co-pilot desktop, that this is where the the this is where the work is gonna get done. So these tools, like to me, if if they shut them off, like the the side panels, I wouldn't miss them at all. I wouldn't even notice that they were gone, to be honest. So to keep, I don't know if it was really the right way to keep on top of it. At the time when they started, to be fair, I mean, it was also new. Um, this was sort of the way that potentially, well, within the maker, we can get it to do this and this. I don't know, like even look at generative pages. I mean, it it just works better to work through some of these additional tools than to actually go into the maker portal itself to do this. Anyways, that's just sort of my opinion on this, really.

Ulrikke

Yeah, yeah. I think maybe I think for me, it's like, well, if you're not gonna maintain anything, I think the problem I'm having with this is that if someone actually finds their way to that surface and tries to use that, it will put them off the hole. They don't they don't underst if they're at that level, they don't understand the difference between the side panel and power pages as a product. The whole experience is shit. And then that's gonna apply to power pages. And power pages is awesome. So that's what I don't like. It's like, yeah, if it's not good enough, get rid of it or make it better. At least keep up with what's out there. And if you have a plugin that understands power pages, at least make sure that the thing that supports that side panel has those capabilities, that it understands the the context that it's in. It's a bit embarrassing. So that's why I kind of well get sort of like that.

Nick

Yeah, yeah. Like even like even if it's not gonna be the way, have a little thing, because they have this for the classic explorer, right? Like, you know, there's a newer and better way to do this, right?

Skills Gallery And Flow Agent MCP

Nick

So just they're not gonna, but yeah.

Ulrikke

All right. But it's speaking of skills, I mean, someone finally created a skills library. Thank you. Uh so I saw uh a post from I think it was Herman Gur that kind of made me aware of the the skills gallery for AI agents, which yes, finally, you guys. I think it's paracat team that is behind it, maybe. Yes, I think that's probably right.

SPEAKER_04

Yep.

Ulrikke

Yeah. Uh and that is huge. So and if and it's not if, like you're playing around the agents and skills, and especially for Power Platform and Microsoft in general, this is now finally the place to go to find all of them. And uh, yeah, it's great work.

Nick

Yeah, there's so many, I mean, there's so many skills in here too, like you know, like like simple like campaign deck builder, blog, content, auditor, classic text adventure, which is you know, so if you play, you know, Colossal Cave adventure like within Copilot Studio. So, I mean, obviously, some folks are you know making having having fun with this, but there's other things that you can go through and add. So I'm just I'm going through the list is getting huge all of a sudden. So it's a great like an exam prep thing, like wow. So yeah, definitely check that out. Great resource. Um and I think they're sort of like they said, they're sort of inspired by PCF Gallery, which of course we know Guido put together years ago. And this is what community is all about building and sharing and getting inspired by these other things that other folks are doing. And then also kind of answering the question, like when people say, Well, what can I use this for? Well, here's a whole bunch of ideas that you can use this for. And I'm definitely for sure, there's a bunch of things you can pick off this list of skills that you'd find useful. So yeah, very PowerCat team is.

Ulrikke

Creativity, curious. So, and also news in in terms of using agents, there's a new flow agent MCP server for Power Automate. So, what we've had and played around with uh in terms of Camus apps and model room apps now is fine, it's now for Power Automate as well. And Reza Durani, the one and only, our go-to source for anything like this, of course, is made of full-length, full tutorial video on how to use this thing end-to-end and what you can expect. And it's pretty dense what you can do. And actually, from my perspective, I think this is way better than what we can do in Dora you know, in terms of user interface from the portal maker experience. Because this covers everything from security, management, connectivity, copying, monitoring, managing. It's everything. You can ask it questions like show me uh the the flows that are failing the most, show me the You can can you use it as a governance tool, which I absolutely you remember when we saw in the release notes the the way that you can see data moving through power itemate flows and that you can actually see the the data map. That was huge. Back, you know, for people that are just joining Power Platform back in the day, we didn't know what flow was triggering which flows. If you had a parent child flow, you can see anywhere that that was a relationship between the two or how data flowed from one to the other, or and now you have full visibility, full governance into this uh play on data and how these trigger each other and how data flows, which is absolutely amazing. So yeah, awesome work from Reza. Thank you for always doing the heavy lifting for us so we can just consume your content and be older, smarter for it. So great. And then

Agentic Governance And CoE Patterns

Ulrikke

we have a few others. So just wanted to mention um Manuela, which we love from the CUE team. No, that's not right. Manuela Pitchler is from the CAT team, and she was one of the uh founders, creators. She was kind of one of the people on the backbone of the CUE starter kit, so central exam starter kit, which we've talked about in a few episodes lately, how they uh stopped kind of maintaining it and it's now kind of deprecated as a thing. It was never product, but that's it. And now, of course, with a genetic coding and all the MCP servers and everything we have for we can now govern power platform without using PPAC too much, which also we've talked about in a few of the last episodes. Now she came up with a resource that I wanted to share with you guys where she published how to build an agentic center of excellence and also agentic transformation patterns. So there's a few good um kind of resources in here and the agentic transformation patterns playbook, which is great that they also published. So we've had a few links uh lately around this topic already. So this is kind of just adding on to the list of resources. So if you're managing PowerPlatform, this is your thing, this is a great resource. So I'll yeah, have links to that.

Nick

Yeah. Amazing, amazing stuff.

Sharing Copilot Studio Agents Securely

Ulrikke

Yeah, yeah, it really is. And then also, and before we move on to the other, what is it called? The other corner of the week, we do have another public announcement type of news thing. Of course, Karsten Growth keeps track of the announcements and messages from the admin center for us. And he found one message from the message center that says that on July 30th, which is today, we have to record, yeah, Copeless Studio unlocks a major new capability. You can now share autonomous agents directly to end users, which is with their own credentials, which is kind of huge. And it opens up, it's kind of mind-blowing in the my mind took a minute to kind of realize what this means. Because it's quite a big step in terms of what you can enable in terms of workflows and who you can reach and how that can work in the in the ecosystem of your company, what you're trying to do, and that's pretty cool. So yeah.

Nick

And what I like about it too is it it can it's if it's gonna run in the context of those end users, then assuming, and maybe I'm making a jump here, but their security will be applied. So let's say you run that agent and you get a bunch of results back, but then I run it. If it's grounded in data that we both have different access to, it still serves our purposes, but we know that the the data is properly being protected, if I understand that correctly. So I mean, that's definitely uh definitely important too. But then from a deployment kind of capabilities there, it's just sort of, you know, it's easier to manage.

Ulrikke

Hopefully that ties into you know, other per public-facing things like the new native app, maybe it opens up for capabilities where external users, so imagine you share your app and then one of the new native Canvas apps or power apps, and then you want to have an agentic autumn an autonomous agent connected to that. If you could if a power if Copala Studio wasn't enabled to be shared with external users, then you can use that capability in that type of app. So this is kind of a maybe it's a backward kind of a capability type of request to afford those kinds of things, right? So, same for power, you know, power pages. You have a Copala Studio age in the PowerPages, it's external users, you need that interaction to external users, then this opens up for that as well. So yeah, it's a

Makers Adopting VS Code

Ulrikke

myriad of things. And then uh you got some publicity this week. Someone very important picked up your blog post.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, yeah. It's always it, it's good, it's a good feeling if I know it's Yucca approved.

Nick

Because I, you know, sometimes if I if I write, if I write something or do a blog post, like I'm almost like some someday someone's gonna catch up to the fact that I don't know anything at all, and I'm just making it up as I go along. And it's gonna be either Yucca or Steve that's gonna figure that out and call me out on it. But imposter syndrome.

unknown

Yeah.

Nick

Maybe. But no, I think I do appreciate what Yuka called out because I it was sort of I I did uh you you guys probably saw the the post or the video. It was ditch the power apps maker portal. And I you know, it's it is it is a way to generate a bit of bit of clickbait or bit or bit a bit of engagement, let's just put it that way.

Ulrikke

You know my feelings about clickbait. Don't just move on.

Nick

So, but basically it was like, and the thing is, it's for me to for me, I am part of it was the reason why I made that one, made that video was because I'm hearing from a lot of people, they're going, well, I'm just a maker. Visual Studio Code is a is a developer tool. It's you know beyond my capabilities. I, you know, I'll stick with the maker portal, let the developers do the development part of it. But I'm like, no, Visual Studio Code, and yeah, don't get me wrong, it is bit it's very intimidating when you first load it up if you're used to the maker portals. But at the end of the day, it's really just an editor, it's a bit of a harness for some of these agents and stuff like that. So, and as a maker, you can generate, you can definitely get a lot more productivity and get the agents to do a lot of this, you know, even if you're building traditional model-driven apps or canvas apps, or what we just talked about, Power Automate, you can get these tools to make things a lot more efficient because you understand how this works and you can do it more. So we talked, we talked a couple times already. Sarah LogerQuest, she's making plugins now. Like, you know, so if, you know, so that's why I wanted to make sure that, hey, let's not exclude the existing makers, citizen developers, and whatever else. Start using, you know, tools like Visual Studio Code or GitHub uh co-pilot desktop or you know, a lot of these different things. I mean, we are still early days, so there are a few little glitches and complexities. We did have somebody actually did follow my video and try to put it together. And he he got back to me, he said he had a few little struggles along the way, but he was experimenting, he was trying. So I I love that of our community, that whole experimental aspect to it. So, like uh, but Yuca kind of called it out as well about how the fact that with all these tools we can now create tool apps and agents and whatever else a lot faster doing that. So, yeah,

The AI Image Slop Debate Returns

Nick

thanks Yuka for liking my post. Appreciate it.

Ulrikke

And also, again, why use AI to create your pictures for you? Because it doesn't know how to do you. I've told you. We called out this dude, and you were on the podcast. It doesn't do you, dude. When are you gonna get it? It doesn't look like you at all.

SPEAKER_00

What you are you talking about? Are you talking about the the thumbnail that I did or what you could did?

Ulrikke

No, you the the thing you the blog post feature that you did is a slop because it doesn't look like you. And yeah, I'm not having it. It's just nope.

Nick

Okay. I did another I did another post this week, so I'll go back to the I'll go back to the real photos and staging everything.

Ulrikke

I tried my best to get it to remove the blue kind of thing that exactly that in your glasses. It just doesn't come, it does something wrong with your eyes. It can't do it. I've tried enough to know that it's not gonna be able to do it. So just stop it already. Just keep the the the good old stuff, just keep the unsplash pictures. You used to do that so well. Doesn't need your slop. All right, so let's move on. I need to go pick Herman up soon, so we need to kick kick this off. So also someone else who did a fun thing this week. Yeah. So, no, but

Doom Inside A Model-Driven App

Ulrikke

yeah, okay, sorry. So someone else did something fun this week. And you know what? I remember sitting next to my uncle. My uncle's in a wheelchair, and one of the things we enjoyed doing when I was I would stay there for weeks of weeks. My whole summer I would stay with him. And I used to sit beside him on this little wooden chair, and he would sit there and he would play Doom. And I would look around the corners, and he used to, you know, till this day he'll tell the story of how he was playing Doom, and I was sitting next to him looking around the corners to see if I could on the screen. And to the point was like, can you move your head so that I can see what's on the screen? It's like I remember this so vividly. And and when I saw this post from Joe, I was like, oh my god, I haven't played Doom in so long. Just kind of, it's there's nothing that well, probably there's millions of things, but for me, it's a one of the core childhood memories of mine. So there's nothing quite like it. I just, yeah, all that aside.

Nick

I'm gonna show my age a little bit because was maybe while you were a little child. I was in college and of course, Doom came out. Of course, we were playing it on our computer, like at that time, big desktop computers with my 30 megabyte hard drive and whatever else. But then one of the folks at school discovered a directory buried deep down where we actually had write access, like for uploading our assignments and everything like that. So he installed Doom on that shared folder. This was like a Novell network, like this is before Windows NT and everything. He installed Doom.

Ulrikke

I don't understand half of the words you're saying, but that sounds so amazing.

Nick

So he put it this way, he installed it on a he installed Doom on a little back corner of the school network that no one knew about. And so we went in the, we would go into the computer labs after hours, a bunch of us, and play head-to-head Doom because this was one of the very first multiplayer games that were available. Yeah. And we would just be like, you know, shooting each other and going and like, hey, did you shoot me from behind and all of this other stuff? Like because at that time, that game was so advanced, like 3D games. Like, I mean, there they had was preceded by like Castle Wolfenstein, but that was just it was just one of those things, and we would play get to the point where like I think we talked about this before with like a Tetris or whatever else, like get to the point you'd be dreaming in like doom and the demons are coming out at you.

Ulrikke

Jesus, yeah. Actually, I do have actually that makes a lot of sense because I do have memories of childhood kind of nightmares where I'm chased through a basement with pipes and stuff. And also, you know what? You know how sounds though how smells can take you back. So for me, the smell of play-doh takes me back to my room when I was a kid. The sound of changing guns in Doom, especially to the A key, was it A K D?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

Ulrikke

I can if I hear that, that that is such a distinct sound. I bet I can play that any movie, anytime. You know, it's like that scream sound, right? And you play that and it's just, yep, my mind just picks that up. It's fantastic. There's so many core memories we get. I mean, tech we could go on all.

Nick

One of our first episodes was about what game would you reproduce or what would you do if we yeah, and remember, remember, because I it's funny because I I every so often do listen to our latest episode, make sure like we didn't say anything too stupid. But when I was driving, when I was driving uh from like for the camping trip, I had to, you know, okay, and then of course I was driving, didn't really switch the episode, and then on Spotify, it went immediately to the first episode. And I know how sometimes you complain to me about how bad our sound is. Like, like I said, just go back to that first episode, and then anything after that sounds so much better because it sounded like we were recording in like a closet or something, all the echoing and everything. We had no idea what we were doing.

Ulrikke

Not that this is state of the art, let's add, because we do realize that this is not state of the art audio either. But you know, we as you you you you remind me of this every two weeks. We get paid the same, so it's fine.

SPEAKER_00

Yep, exactly.

Ulrikke

But yeah, but also, I mean, uh and also when you told me that your uh brother-in-law would listen to our podcasts just because you told him you had we had a podcast, and then he goes and listens to it. And I'm like, well, does he start does he then start from the first or the last?

Nick

I hope it's the last one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that that the so quick little shout out to our non-techie listeners. Yeah, my brother-in-law Ed. Lizzy's mom. Yeah, yeah. Who noticed who noticed my tattoo and asked me what that was all about. So I told him, and then he knew what it and then I was in the house and I heard in the background, I'm like, wait a minute, that's the jingle from our podcast. Like, that's weird. And like, and then he's looking at it, and he it's funny because he's looking at his tablet and he goes, so 10 coffees in a Red Bull something like that. But then another shit, yeah, shout out to uh so uh Pat Pat McGarry Roberts or Dr. Pat, um Lizzie's mom, and she sent me a message too. She said, like, I had no idea what you guys are talking about until this part, which of course meant something different, and it was this sort of like uh it was so funny because I like texted like Lizzie and I said, Your mom listens to our podcast. So cute.

Ulrikke

I absolutely love hearing about all these people that kind of listen, even though they don't really understand what we're talking about. It's so uh it's heartwarming, I must say, and a little bit embarrassing. I don't know why. It's like my family also keep talking with me about this podcast. It's like it's I was like, don't you don't have please don't listen to it. It's fine.

SPEAKER_00

It's you don't yeah, there's so there's so many better podcasts out there than for you folks than this one.

Ulrikke

Spend the time listening to crime podcasts or something, it's much more fulfilling for you.

Nick

Like diary of a CEO or something.

Ulrikke

Yeah, yeah, 100%. All right, so let's wrap this up.

SPEAKER_00

Yes, for sure.

Ulrikke

So the point was Joe created a model-driven app that plays Doom. And how he does it is that he created some, it's a WAD file. So he yeah, that is embedded into Doom. So that's how you can play Doom, and then he has a GitHub repository where you can download the code and apply it and upload it to your own power platform environment so you can actually do this yourself. And then I had to look up what a WAD file was, and I love this. It's short for where's all the data.

Nick

That makes sense. Yeah.

Ulrikke

YAML. What does YAML still? It's yet another mark YAML. Yet another markdown markup language. I I love these little hidden things, it's so much fun. So great work, uh Joe. Uh yeah.

Nick

Well, there goes my afternoon then.

Ulrikke

I know, and also you can listen to Joe and Sebastian's podcast, which is them ranting on talking about different things, which is fun.

Nick

Yeah, and I think they've they've gone beyond seven episodes, so it's worth listening to now.

Ulrikke

I know, I know, because that's what you have to do to be certified. I think if you can make it past seven, then you're gonna stay on.

Nick

Statistics are.

Ulrikke

We're gonna reach a hundred.

Nick

Countdown is on Christmas.

Ulrikke

A bit of singing and dancing. Uh you're right.

Community Calls And Closing Requests

Ulrikke

We have promised our people. So also a little shout out to Charles Sexton for bringing us the Code App, Vibe App, and PowerPlatform Skills Weekly, which contains news on the new added work IQ paths for our code apps um in the Power Apps Power Platform Skills repo repo. And also, I joined a few of the latest community calls for PowerPlatform and Marks of 365. And if you did not get our subtle hints um from earlier episodes that the platforms are moving together, this should give you a good indication because it's now called Copilot Marks of 365 and PowerPlatform updates. Community calls. So Copilot Studio now being part of Marks of 365, roadmap tells you that they're kind of merging. So it's it's fun. So, and also if you're interested in kind of learning to speak and get out there with community work, this is a very good place to start. They're always looking for people that want to get into speaking. It's a very low threshold for anyone who's getting started, who just want kind of a small, very friendly audience to test their demo for or whatever it is. Just there's gonna be a link in the show notes where you can fill in your request to hold a session. And it's done every, I think there's one every week uh now, which is awesome.

Nick

Perfect. Yeah, and they're uh and then the guy who uh what's his face who runs it? Even the tip of my tongue. I see him. David Swarter? Yes, thank you. Because David, talk about balls of energy. David gets the like he is like the the talk show host and just gets that. There's another guy that just is on like a 20 Red Bulls, I think, at any given moment. So it's definitely entertaining.

Ulrikke

Uh huh. Yeah, that yeah. I just I yeah, because I was at the beach and I thought, you know what? This is just gonna make my day. And that's why I joined. And it was so much fun. He just brings it such a ball of energy. I love it. So that's great. We're gonna see uh David in Vegas, I expect, which is gonna be fun. All right. So this is a wrap-up. Thank you guys for listening this week, and we'll uh see you guys in a few weeks.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, and hopefully on time next time.

Ulrikke

Bye bye. Thanks for listening. And if you like this episode, please make sure to share it with your friends and colleagues in the community. Make sure to leave a rating and review of your favorite streaming service and makes it easier for others to find us. Follow us on the social media platforms and make sure you don't miss an episode. Thanks for listening to the Power Platform Boost podcast with your hosts, Ulrika Akerbeck and Nick Dolman, and see you next time for your timely boost of Par Platform News.

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Nick Doelman

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Ulrikke Akerbæk

Host