Turning a new chapter - the MVP Alumni post

A few months ago I wrote that I’m turning a page, I’ve found motivation to move forward again, and have begin to actively change my destiny (instead of being passive and waiting for it to happen to me). I wanted to give an update and write as I feel I’m moving onwards onto a new chapter.

• Some things changed a lot

• Some things didn’t change much

• Some things I must give my full attention to

• Some things I must let go

Some things changed a lot

At the end of last year, I met someone through church meetings that was a friend, who became a close friend, then a fiancé and now my wife. Sometimes, the right person appears suddenly in your life when you are at your lowest, and she didn’t ask questions and just picks you up. I’m grateful to recognize that God is giving me a second chance and I wanted to take that path to move forward with purpose.

• Moved out from previous family home with a big renovation project completed.

• Resumed part time work that quickly became full time.

  • Exercising a lot of my Power Automate and Power BI muscles

• Lost weight, became more healthy

  • and working on gaining more energy via fixing my sleep

• Married, with two more children, so now a total of four.

  • also add two cats.

• Moved into a bigger house and the various organization and fixing challenges

• I have not been very active in the communities (covid, and later as I got swamped with full time work), so alas, I can’t maintain my Microsoft MVP status. After 7 years from 2017 to 2023, I must pass on the spot to someone else.

• I realized I can do lots of DIY projects and I love doing them. It’s refreshing to realize that I can build physical things and not just digital things.

• I also realized I really quite like the tranquility of going camping.

Some things didn’t change much

• I still love to chat, tell people how to build things

• I am speaking at the Digital Workplace Conference in August 2-3. Presenting topics related to Power Automate and Power BI dataflow.

• I will still find time to blog, make YouTube content

• I still love working on Flow Studio and helping customers.

Some things I must give my full attention to

• Flow Studio, my startup, must continue to grow and I’m working on multiple aspects of our offerings relating to Power Platform monitoring and governance.

• Grow my YouTube channel, I think between my YouTube and my blog is where I’ll continue to reach more of you.

  • Twitter where we met before is becoming such a strange place

  • Reddit is weird too

  • Some of the community events are no longer around after Covid

• My health, which is improving, so I’ll still be here for a long time to writing things.

• My family, which requires me to be around for a long time

Some things I must let go

A younger me thought that hey I’ll build cool things and tell people how to build them. You’ll find this person on this very blog, over the span of twenty years.
Over two decades, I had fun with you all. I built a career, which let me build what I wanted and be on the cutting (yes I bleed a lot so you don’t have to bleed as much) edge.
I wrote, spoke, presented and taught on these topics. I received and maintained the MVP award status.

But I must tell you, when everything comes crashing down, none of this mattered. Career, wealth, fame, travels, future.

Consider what is closest and important to you. Do more of that. Spend time with people that you should have - don’t regret it afterwards when it is too late to do anything different.

I am thankful for the MVP program for recognizing my contributions to the community, and for the many beautiful friendships I’ve made along the way. I’m grateful that I have a clear path to move on, and I hope you all are still here to cheer me on.

So it feels so good to put these things to words. I’m fourty-four. I feel like I’ve climbed out of a valley. There’s a new horizon in sight, I have a second chance.

I’m always here, online and physically in person around Australia.
I’m sure we’ll meet again soon.

2021 - broken, I am missing you Lina Abidin

I told myself this eventually would happen, but I still am not prepared for it when it did. How can anyone be prepared for what happens next.

On March 25th, a couple of hours past midnight, the love of my life Lina passed away peacefully in her sleep.

We had been fighting cancer for the last 5 years, it really hurts that we couldn’t beat it, and she has to go so young. Lina barely made it past her birthday in February, she was 41. We met each other when we were 20s and she’s been grinning at me for the last 21 years.

Lina is someone I don’t write a lot about, but has always been the driving force of many things that I did (or rather, we did together). She understood what I do - she was the first to cheer for my MVP award (we went to celebrate with yummy food!), she took care of the kids, she took care of our business, she’s always got my back, she made sure I smile - she is someone that is always smiling.

So now I have the near impossible task of raising our two young kids and I really don’t know how I’m going to do this alone.

Everywhere I look, I see her. I wish, I had more time to tell her how much I’m missing her.

In my January post I said I would probably take time off until April. I’m going to need more time. Right now the kids are in school holidays for two weeks, and I’m taking the time to care for them. As school resumes next semester, I’m going to see if I can ease myself back into work.

• There’s work to do to update Flow Studio.

• Have some ideas and plans for Clarity - but more importantly, I’m really keen to hear from friends and teams that needs automated flow monitoring. Let me know if that is you.

• I also have consulting work to resume with a few clients.

Lots to do, but some days, I crash and can’t find the ability to pull myself together to work on anything.

In her final days, she’d grab my face to tell me:

Remember to smile, don’t bottle everything in your heart.

I don’t know how to smile anymore, I cry and wail, as someone whose heart is utterly broken does.

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:

2021 goals:

Survive. If we live, more good things can happen.

— John Liu 劉 (@johnnliu) December 27, 2020

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.

Where to find John presenting in May 2020

We are living right now in a strange time. At home, and virtual events are replacing the traditional physical events.

I’ve agreed to several events and will be presenting all new (or freshly updated) topics for 2020. So while we remain physically distant, if you wanted to see one of my presentations - I’m actually a lot more visible.

May 01 - DC Power Apps & Power Automate usergroup - Why and How to implement Governance of the Power Platform

May 06 - Sydney Serverless meetup - Power Automate - Microsoft’s insane low-code serverless platform

May 11 - M365 May - Deep dive into Approvals in SharePoint and Teams with Power Automate

May 11 - USYD Cloud Society Azure/Power Up! - Intro Power Apps and Power Automate

May 15 - Sydney Power Apps and Flow usergroup - What’s new in Power Virtual Agents with Charles Sterling

May 16 - D365 Automation Saturday - Flow JAM Stack - how to build a complete low-code public website in 40 minutes

May 25 - UNSW Cloud Society - Azure/Power Up! - Intro Power Apps and Power Automate

May 26 - M365 May - Why and How to implement Governance of the Power Platform

May 27-28 - M365 Virtual Marathon - 5 Design Keys to make Flows run insanely fast

May 27-28 - M365 Virtual Marathon - Flow JAM Stack - how to build a complete low-code public website backed by M365

I’m still working on my YouTube series: How to build a public website with a Flow JAM Stack

Because of the events next week, I couldn’t work on an episode this week. But next Saturday’s Flow JAM Stack talk during the Automation Saturday will be a 40 minutes compressed teaser. Hope to catch you at one or many of these upcoming events.

M365 Developer Bootcamp and M365 Saturday Sydney

There are two events coming up soon in Sydney regarding the SharePoint, Office 365 and Microsoft 365 community and ecosystem.

M365 Developer Bootcamp Sydney

The M365 Developer Bootcamp is the return of the popular Global Office 365 Developer Bootcamp. This is when the Office 365 MVPs and community experts help everyone and anyone that wants to have a crack at solving any Office 365 (and M365) related coding challenges.

Whether it is to build a SPFx webpart, extend Microsoft Teams, explore Microsoft Graph. The format this year will be lighter on talks, and more focused on helping you pick a challenge you want to do, and help you complete that project.

Friday, October 18 at the Microsoft Reactor in Level 10, 11 York Street, Sydney (above Wynyard Station in the Sydney Startup Hub).

https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/global-microsoft-365-developer-bootcamp-sydney-2019-tickets-71607805875

M365 Saturday

The SharePoint Saturday / O365 Saturday Sydney returns this year as M365 Saturday.

Administrators, end users, architects, developers, and other professionals that work with Microsoft 365 Technologies will meet for the 11th SPS Events Sydney event!

This event is aimed to cover best practices, product/feature usage, and getting the most from the platform and discovering what is possible rather than deep diving into "how to" development topics. Developer topics will be covered more in the M365 Developer Bootcamp above.

Saturday, October 26 at the Microsoft Reactor

http://www.spsevents.org/city/Sydney

Call for speakers is still open for M365 Saturday

https://sessionize.com/m365-saturday-sydney-2019

Help us spread the word, and let us know if you would like to present something!