Our Legacy

This blog post is quite personal and doesn’t have much to do with tech. So if that’s not what you are here for, wait for the next blog post. This is personal to me though, so if you want to read about me, everything with flaws and all, then follow along.

Why am I writing this here on my blog?

I’ve been watching (I know, late) Hamilton the musical, and the ending “who lives, who dies, who tells your story” really startled me. In the story, the widow lives another 50 years after him and did all sort of things to tell his legacy. It really got me thinking - what about my wife, who left us so young, so soon, who will tell the story of this quiet girl that was never in the public spotlight, but fun, loving, always happy and full of kindness. Who else, but me? The person that loved and knew her the most.

Where do I even write this? Hamilton, being a founding father of America - has scores of historians looking up all the letters, correspondences and essays that he wrote during his time. There’s nothing like that for Lina Abidin, she didn’t write many things, and there will be no historians to talk about her one day, but we do live in the Internet age so I will write about her, on the platform that will be archived for the world to remember, on my public blog.

What is our legacy?

John as a young man would be quite similar to Hamilton - young, hungry and scrappy. He believed he is pretty smart and can do anything he put his mind to. As he grew in his career - he dreamed of starting his own company and start up.

Lina as a young lady did not have grand aspirations (or grand delusions?) as John, but she always saw herself as someone that will use her financial skills and sharp wits to help her husband. So in 2018, when we finally started my own company Flow Studio - Lina was delighted. She didn’t need us to be rich beyond our wildest dreams - she just wanted a comfortable living with me and our kids.

What is Lina’s skill? She is extremely talented at finding and understanding numbers, and how to calculate best outcomes. Tax and accounting comes naturally to her, financial modelling is her forte, and pretty much every computer game we played together she has a fully working Excel spreadsheet powering the calculations and the shortest paths to the best rewards in the game. She has more excel files than games in her Steam library.

Hey kids, it’s actually all about you two

As I looked back in the final period of our lives together, her concerns were increasingly focused on our children. She wanted them to eat the yummy food that she could cook. She wanted to knit more articles of clothing and make crochet toys for them. She wanted to sort out her will so that they will be protected for the kids so even John can’t screw it up.

Ultimately, I had thought our legacy would be some sort of wealth that we’ve built together. But when it all comes down to the end, it was our two lovely kids that’s the only thing on her mind.

We thought perhaps she can pre-record some things to say to them when they come of age, and we tried, we really tried - but Lina could not stop crying when we try to record these, she says she wanted to see their wedding, their partners and their children and how unfair it all seems that she would not be there to see them graduate, or hit any of these life milestones.

I didn’t have anything to say to her, I can only hug her and say “hey, if anything feels too hard, let me take care of it, OK?”.
“OK, she said”.

With that she was able to stop worrying at the end and enter into rest.

Future

What’s next for us, for the kids, for our company, for our livelihood? I have no idea. But I will do my absolute best to raise her legacy. I was very much reminded of this this week, and I wanted to commit my promises to her, to words.

May the Internet and our kids be my witness.

Tiny forward steps for me and Flow Studio

miriam-eh-kWWeA1DVQxY-unsplash (1).jpg

I’ve been taking little tiny steps forward, this is a good time to share what I’ve been up to.

Flow Studio

There are several Flow Studio updates in the works. v1.1.00 is coming out very soon, and there are several important updates:

  • The development build is on https://dev.flowstudio.app/

  • The major update are changes to the backend APIs that flow studio calls. I am really thankful for the extra time given for me to work on this.

  • In subscriptions link there is now a way to see and manage your own subscriptions, using the Stripe billing support page.

  • There are a number of UX fixes to improve performance and bug fixes since last update.

Please let me know if you have any issues with Flow Studio. Bug fixes are priority.

Branding and Product Offerings

I renamed from Flow Studio to Power Studio last year, and introduced a new product Power Clarity. This has created a lot of additional branding work that’s time consuming to manage. So I’ve decided to simplify everything.

Original Updated Notes
Power Studio Flow Studio
Flow Studio Flow Studio We are going back to our original name
Power Studio Free   Flow Studio Free The freemium offering
Power Studio Pro Flow Studio Pro US$20 Monthly / US$200 Yearly
Power Clarity Flow Studio Teams US$2000 Yearly
Power Clarity Flow Studio Enterprise   Enquire

Flow Studio Free is for everyone

  • quickly see all your own flows

  • manage them using a tool designed for bulk operations.

Flow Studio Pro is for power users who needs more operations

  • Editing Flow JSON

  • Migrate flows

  • Bulk cancellation

  • Export flow history

  • Restore Flow to earlier versions.

  • Administrators that wants to see all the flows in their environment

Flow Studio Teams is for teams to manage all the flows used by their team

  • See all your flows, across multiple accounts

  • Manage them in bulk

  • Continuous monitoring of flow runs

  • Continuous backups

Flow Studio Enterprise is for IT and compliance departments that wants to have full visibility to understand, manage and utilize all the flows used within an organization.

  • Licensing assistance

  • Backup, migrate flows between accounts

  • DLP policy assistance and violations

  • Continuous reports

  • Cross tenancy support


How are you doing, John?

I’m OK, thank you for reaching out. Some days are really good, other days I can’t do it and just take a break.

It is currently school holidays in Sydney and we are in a new lockdown, so stuck at home. Let me know if you want to chat, I can find time to chat (remotely is OK).

2021 - break and thrive

Hello, you.

This is a very personal post.

2020 was tough on everybody, and it looks like 2021 may eventually bring a little bit of reprieve. I only have a modest and simple wish:

kurt-cotoaga-9Nq1IUhhayg-unsplash.jpg


For an immediate, urgent and heavy family matter, I must take a really significant break to try and ensure me and my family survives 2021. For our young family, this is a time of immense personal pain and loss.

  • I must take a break to be with my family — at least until April, but may be many more months. There’s no hurrying this, I want to take a much time as we need.

  • My consulting clients are aware of what’s happening and are so supportive. I have some reduced work with them that I will fulfill.

  • Flow Studio / Power Studio will continue, in the short time there’s a bunch of additional updates in the preview dev build dev.flowstudio.app that needs to be validated and pushed over into production.

  • Power Clarity will continue, but in a much, much slower pace.

  • My writings on the blog or YouTube will be random. There are mornings when I can muster some energy to write, in code or in blogs. If you enjoy them and want to see more, you REALLY have to tell me because I need (and otherwise lack) energy to produce them.

  • I’m unlikely to respond to questions on Twitter or LinkedIn

What can you do for us?

  • If you use Power Automate - I would really appreciate it if you would have a look at powerstudio.app, either for yourself or tell people about it. If it’s helpful to you, consider subscribe to it. If it doesn’t help you - let me know what might push you over the line to be a fan.

  • If you are already one of our 5400+ users or fans of Power Studio and wants to see the future evolved version - check out powerclarity.app

  • If you like Power Apps - you really should check out my GamePad PCF component and tell people about it.

  • I’m keeping my circumstances personal, but a generic statements that has a time component like hope you’ll get through it quickly, or hope you recover soon can miss the mark because I want as much time as we can to still have together. A nicer thing to say is probably please survive as long as you can.

  • Please put it in your calendar to check in on me every month from now, may be beginning of March, or beginning of April. Future me probably need someone to check in on me.

  • Years in the future, when the pandemic is over, invite me to your home for a meal.

How are you feeling?

We are free falling. There’s no parachute. When we hit the ground, at least one of us won’t survive, but we may all fall apart. We are already falling apart.

Creating Multiple Custom Email-Alias Addresses with one Outlook account

Update thank you to Johannes in the comments.  This is called Email Sub-Addressing.

I was catching up with my brother, and he showed me a pretty cool trick with gmail.

If you mail [email protected] (not his real email address) with mark-liu+test@gmail.com - the email would arrive at his inbox.

Not to be outdone, I tested this with Outlook, and sure enough.  If you mail: john-liu+test a outlook dot com they'd arrive in my personal mailbox.  You can do anything after the + character.  +spam, +newspaper, +test1 etc etc.

I have no idea what this feature is called - for Gmail it seems to be called "Creating Multiple Custom Email Addresses with one Gmail account".  May be this is called Email-Alias? 

So this is just a short blog about an Outlook version of this feature.  This works for Hotmail as well.

What is this good for?

  • Test throw away emails, e.g. testing your registration process code
  • Spam emails and figuring out where they came from
  • Easy to set up filter rule to get rid of emails you don't want
  • You should definitely have a john-liu+spam alias for signing up to newsletters.

Notes

  • Doesn't work for Exchange or Office 365 email addresses.

A Hybrid Future for On-Premises

Hybrid - In Theory

I think it is no suprise for us watching from the SharePoint world (sometimes with a slight envy) at all the investments in the cloud.

Microsoft makes no secret about this - cloud is a massive growth area and an area that Microsoft is and will aggressively pursue.

SharePoint itself is a product born On-Premise. But many of the Experiences are now born-in-the-Cloud.

What I was very relieved to see though, is that in this mad push for Cloud-First, Microsoft reaffirms that they will not leave their customers behind. This is where I feel the Hybrid story that has came out is so refreshing.

What's coming down?

  • OneDrive for Business coming to SharePoint 2010
  • Delve coming to SharePoint 2013 first
  • Continue to evolve Hybrid Search

Hybrid in the Real World

The landscape "I" see.  This part is where I get yelled at, or perhaps I'm seen as a Fanboy.  I'll just say what I saw.

In the year 2013 - I saw the future that Microsoft wanted was all Cloud.  I was very dismayed - Australia is not particularly fast at going to the cloud.  Many of our enterprises aren't even migrating their SharePoint installations from 2010.  What about data sovereignty?  In the light of NSA spying case in 2014 it looked even worse. 

In the following year June 2014, the Australian Government modified its policy to say it is up to each Department Head to decide whether it is OK to store data offshore.  No doubt pushed by both budget cuts, internal push, external Vendor Pricing and a public statement of cutting out unnecessary Red-Tape.

Now, I hear cloud being implemented left and right.  Prime examples?

  • Exchange Online - much bigger mailboxes than on-prem.  Mobile friendly.
  • To get Exchange Online, a company pretty much has their Active Directory synchronized to Azure AD.  ADFS is nicer for SSO, but more servers.  Small and medium enterprises are pretty happy with DirSync.  That's another tick.
  • OneDrive for Business - relatively large personal storage space that allows Enterprise IT control
  • Office Client Licenses.  As part of the Office 365 package, the cheaper client licenses (and up to 5 devices, as well as additional mobile/tablet licenses) are also a huge win.
  • Yammer - Corporate-friendly, sanctioned "social platform".  Seriously, your youngster employees wants to talk, at least give them the right place to make that conversation heard.
  • Lync/Skype for Business - Lync Online took care of a lot of remote VOIP scenarios.  Lync Server worked well with Polycom and other On-Prem solutions.
  • Extranet Sites (SharePoint) where the company wants to share "some" content with an external partner.

There will always be companies that can't move everything to the cloud, but I think more and more companies are considering what they *could* move.  Most companies don't really want to host their own Exchange Server, unless they really have to.  And even for those rare cases, my Bank client is implementing Yammer as their Enterprise Social solution.

 

Reading the Tea Leaves

Oh my favourite activity.  I love doing this and yet I'm so bad at it.

I'm terrible at reading the future.  So I only wanted to mostly comment on the past.  Perhaps as a consultant that works across many different sectors (building, education, transport, mining and banking), and as a community person that loves to talk to everybody I meet, I do see quite a bit.

And what I see aligns with what Microsoft is doing.  So I think it's safe to predict this one:

Bet on the Cloud.  And if you can't do that yet, Bet on Hybrid.