DEV Community: Megan Mallin

Tips for creating your first Power App

Megan Mallin — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 11:48:09 +0000

Power Apps helps you turn ideas into solutions by enabling you to build custom apps that solve a particular challenge. Whether you are a business user, a career changer or a student, anyone can quickly and easily get started with Microsoft Power Apps. Here are a couple of tips to get started building your first app.

1. Know your tools
If you are familiar with tools such as PowerPoint, Excel or maybe even SharePoint, you will find working with Power Apps similar. The user interface will be familiar some functionality such as drag and drop makes it very user friendly.

2. Start Small
Think of a really well-defined task for your app to perform and get clear on what your outcomes are or what success looks like. Thinking about creating a solution is a lot easier when you know what the problem is. This lets you dive right in to playing around, but helps you stay focused.

3. Know your audience
Knowing who is going to use your app and how is going to help your app be successful. If you are familiar with the end user, it’s usually pretty easy to work out the type of device they are likely to access the app through such as a phone, tablet or browser. If you aren’t familiar with the end user, then you may need to do a bit of research – what devices do they use, how much time and effort will they want to invest or what value will they get from this app? You may need to put yourself in the shoes of a user to really make your app successful.

4. Find your Tribe: AKA Community
You don’t need to go it alone. There is a really active community of users and experts who are eager to help. This could be through Microsoft Learn Student Ambassadors if you are currently part of that program, through community experts like Microsoft MVPs, local meetup or user groups or there are plenty of online forums and community boards you can check out.

5. Keep on learning!
There are heaps of formal and informal learning resources available through Microsoft Learn, where you can pick some specific modules like getting started with canvas apps or go for a longer Learning Path such as Power Platform Fundamentals. You may even want to go all out and check out certification. If there is a specific feature you want to learn more about, Microsoft Docs has a huge amount of documentation to walk you through step by step. There is always local or international events through video platforms that you can attend virtually or watch later on demand. Whatever your learning style, there are endless ways that you can learn more.

Here are also links to some other resources to get you going:

Get started with Power apps
Power apps Blog
Power Apps Online Community
Find a local User Group / MeetUp:
Join the conversation on Twitter: #PowerAddicts
MS Learn Path
Videos and Tutorial
Details on Licensing

Note: This post is a summary of a talk which I delivered at Microsoft Ignite 2020. The session will be available on demand in late September, so link will be updated when available.

Finding your tribe - RESOURCES / LINKS (Reactor Sydney)

Megan Mallin — Tue, 17 Sep 2019 01:18:40 +0000

Thanks to everyone who joined my session.

My talk "Finding your tribe - It all begins with community" mentioned a bunch of great dev community groups who are doing awesome things. Here is a list of all the communities and people that I referenced:

These are the groups I mentioned that are really popular:
Sydney Python MeetUp
Data Science Melbourne
PyData Sydney
Fishburners Meetup
Sydney-Data-Science-Breakfast,

These are the community groups that are innovating and shaking things up:
Women Who Code Melbourne
HackUp Melbourne
Power BI Sydney
Men Championing Change Sydney

Some people to check out live coding on Twitch:
Kym Phillpotts
Noopkat
Jim Bennett

A great online initiative:
HacktoberFest

Hackathons:
Hackathons Australia
She Hacks 2019 Sydney
Microsoft Global Hack

Champion/Ambassador Programs:
Microsoft MVP
Docker Captains
AWS Community Heroes
Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Ambassadors
Google Developer Experts
Java Champions

Some Upcoming community events are:
DDD Sydney
NDC Sydney
.Net DownUnder Community Day
GopherCon
Laracon
All Day DevOps
Kubernetes Forum Sydney

Thank you

Finding your tribe - RESOURCES / LINKS (DDD Melb 19)

Megan Mallin — Fri, 09 Aug 2019 21:54:49 +0000