What a week… Reflection and Power Apps
President Biden stated that we must end this Uncivil War. I couldn’t agree more, and feel that a hero of mine has shared some important insight on this matter in the past:
“The majority of us wait until a war breaks out in order to begin some kind of effort to stop it. Many of us do not know that the roots of war are everywhere, including in our own thinking and way of life.”
Excerpt From Anger, Thích Nhất Hạnh
Power Apps Bullet Journal Discovery
I always find myself tinkering with new bits of technology and this has taken me on exciting adventures into worlds filled with ReactJS, Kubernetes, and console commands. The problem with most of this tech is that it can be quite labor-intensive. This doesn’t jive well with my work-life balance considering my day job isn’t directly aligned to it. However, an understanding of the code world does help me when proposing the benefits of low-code and no-code solutions and helps me be honest with customers about when they should be coding.
Coming to terms with having less time to tinker but still needing to stay current has me leaning more heavily on The Power Platform. This week, I leveraged The Power Platform to build out the beginnings of a Bullet Journal Power App. I wanted to build this out because I feel there is a gap between most/all to-do list apps on the market today and the productivity methodology I’ve found works best for me. The vision behind this app, one that is not executed yet, is to be able to rapidly build out a UX on top of Microsoft ToDo that allows me to incorporate bullet journal concepts like monthly planning. So far it looks like this:
To accomplish this UX, there were several hurdles I overcame that may be of interest. One part was the dynamic population of tasks for a month, a challenge I faced due to wireframing this in Power Apps as opposed to having a proper back end data source. Having a collection of varying lengths based on the number of days in a given month brought me to the realization that Power Apps does not have an OOTB way of doing for loops, only foreach loops. Through an internet search, I found a workaround, and when the application starts I populate an indexed collection and then iterate through a set of that for my collection of dates:
There’s a lot more to unpack here but I don’t want to risk going too far down a rabbit hole. If you’d like to see more or collaborate with me on this solution feel free to head on down to brendon-colburn/bullet-journal (github.com). Chat with you all again soon!