Sorry for the Vaporware
June 12, 2024
When you live in a foreign country, everything's exciting at first. Your senses are overwhelmed with novelty. Look at that! That's where you shop, here's how to get around. And can you believe it? You're really doing it! Imagine all the wonderful things that'll you'll do now that you're here.
And then six months later, you've figured out the routine. It's no longer fresh and new. Some aspects have even started to become annoying, and you start comparing things unfavorably to your home country. And you haven't had the time to do all that you had planned. Did you make a big mistake?
Probably not. It's a natural tendency, all part of the adaptation to your new home. And once you push though, you can develop a new sense of purpose.
Anyway, I'm six months into my Power Platform journey. I started in December 2023, and built my first Power BI dashboard, my first chatbot, and my first Power App. Later that month, I passed the PL-900 exam for Power Platform Fundamentals. And then I started figuring out what to build next.
I launched this newsletter by announcing a new app, Certification Skills Explorer, that I haven't finished yet.
The idea was to provide a resource to track the skills for each certification. I started with a Python script (using BeautifulSoup) to scrape the HTML from the Microsoft website for all the skills and sub-skills for every Microsoft certification. From there, I figured out how to import the results into a Dataverse database. That was a good start, enough for me to announce it as if it were finished.
The product can go in one of two directions -- personalization, allowing people to track their progress towards certification goals; or toward a wiki-style reference listing articles and videos related to each skill. Or both! With gamification! And a chatbot! & & &
But there's still quite a bit left to do:
1. Build a front-end. (Unless I simply share the model-driven app.)
2. Rethink the scraper. (I don't even need to scrape the Microsoft website -- the full contents of the Microsoft documentation can be found on Github, so it's simply a matter of pulling the files I need for processing.)
3. Automate the ingestion process on a schedule.
Over the past few months, Certification Skills Explorer has been on the back burner in favor of the Power Up final project, a shoe store, which I then converted into a prototype application for event staff in Convention City to share information with guests using dynamic QR codes. The result was a very good demo, but before I can go live with it, I'll need to work through the use cases to make it a bit more focused, and refine the application lifecycle management (ALM) process to ensure that it's ready for deployment.
Once that's handled, I'll be able to return to Certification Skills Explorer. I'm taking the PL-200 Power Platform Functional Consultant exam next month, which should put me in the right headspace for that project.
So that's my plan for the summer: Continue learning, keep building stuff, take out the rough edges, make everything robust.
Finish what I started.
"what's vaporware?"