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Angular-.NET knowledge refresh

Ok, last week I was on an Angular+.NET Core learning spree, and I had to continue since my goals were not met.

  • Monday – Angular foundation
  • Tuesday – Angular foundation cont. – services, .NET Core Web API setup, EF Core
  • Wednesday – continue same… had issues to debug
  • Thursday – replaced bootstrap with ng-bootstrap, for no reason
  • Friday – continues ng-bootstrap wars, and unhappy. Decides to learn Angular Material after reading UI library comparisons
  • Saturday, Today – continues with Angular Material
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Automating Bayzat leave calendar to post daily list in Microsoft Teams group

I was wondering if I can have a feature to post who-are-all-on-planned-leave list daily in the HR/leaders group in Microsoft Teams. Searched for a plugin in the marketplace, and tried to find a API also. Finally, contacted the Bayzat support and found they don’t have a developer API available at the moment. Then I went though the normal HTTP calling methods and found it worked well. Sharing with you, hoping someone will find this useful in future.

Here is the Adaptive Card output you get in Teams:

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This is the high level view of the Power Automate App Flow

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Details:

Step 1 – Get the authentication access token

This token is required for you to get access to any APIs/URLs. Use the login API for this:

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Step 2 – Read the Leave Calendar

My requirement is only to read one single day, so I am passing utcNow()

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Step 3 – Modify the response data as per your requirement

My requirement is small that, I need only list of people marked OOO for this particular day

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Step 4 – Post to Microsoft Teams

I chose to post the data in Teams as an Adaptive Card, so I am posting in that format

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Contact me if you need some clarifications. Make sure to add sufficient validations to make this flow error free.

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Am I technical, or into management?

Just got a feedback from a founder of one of the largest vending machine manufacturing company in India that, my ‘public profile’ is more of program management than technical. That’s indeed a surprise for me and provoked thinking and and analyse my position.

My conclusion in a nutshell,

“I am a technical person, with leadership and management skills”

TL;DR

The Importance of Radio in the 21st Century - Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE)
Image Source: CJFE

When I was a kid, of some age 7, my aunt used to hide her Radio box whenever my family visited her. Yes, I was a bit famous for screwing the electronics devices that time. My cousin brother had a Electronics Appliance Repair shop at home, and he also used to do almost same; shut the door so I will not enter into his work premises. Thanks to my father’s workshop – which was a junk yard of past work remains which included items from few companies like Keltron. My brothers and I used to play with coper wires, transformers, and what not. We wondered how our radio used resume playing when it get a hit on the head when the volume goes down. We started peeking into the radio, then TV and started real exploration. We assembled our own radios (the great L board), LED dancing circuits and power amplifiers. I even sold few to friends and made some Rs. 50/- profit when I was in 8th standard. The same cousin brother said ‘I didn’t know you are this good in Electronics’ when he heard the news that I won the first price in Electronics competitions in School and District level, and then secured 2nd place in Kerala State level.

World of computer was strange for me. My school, made me believe that. There was a computer lab, but the qualification to enter was 90% marks in Mathematics. Obviously, being a hater (that also because of school teachers) I was not interested in the track. Also, computer is not something common that time. Its the era of type writers.

Not much but it's mine. do you think my intel 8088 will bottleneck my IBM MDA graphics card? : r/pcmasterrace
Image Source: Reddit

I have two brothers, twins – elder to me. One of my brother, Arun joined VHSE Computer and Alok in Electronics. Thus I got grip in both tracks. Arun taught be BASIC language, then C. My journey started there. I became very passionate in programming. I made even UI apps in the era of DBase III+ and COBOL. Then I also joined VHSE Computer and systematically explored more. And yeah! I was one of those pet of computer instructors and lab assistants.

I used to help my fellow colleagues with their studies, which let me end up at Graphics Institute of Science and Technology, a small training institute run by Dileep Kumar sir. (all the named used are my local circle names, and nothing to do with popular figures)

(To be continued…)