Career Switchers Have the Power (Platform), w/ Microsoft’s April Dunnam

Raw Data By P3 Adaptive

Today we bring in the big guns, a Microsoft MVP and Power Platform advocacy team lead, and a true Power Platform aficionado: April Dunnam. In the realm of social media, April is known as the Woman who Codes, the SharePoint Siren, and the Karaoke Queen with a passion for all things Power: Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, and Power Pages. In this episode we get April’s origin story, starting with the moment she was the intern tossed into the deep end of the SharePoint pool, all the way to her personal discovery of the better way.

April shares her philosophy on bringing people to the dark side of app building: First, find someone who has a certain level of curiosity and knows there has to be a better way. Those are the future Power Apps Citizen Developers. Hook those people with the polished side by showing them a functional app, then reel them in through the backend drag and drop, no code, low code magic that is the Power Platform. April explains that people tend to have a short attention span; they need the finished product before you show them how simple the build process can be.

Later on, Rob and April discuss the biggest opportunity for improvement in the Power Platform, the lack of a consistent programming language. With the build-by-example function in Power Apps, the technology is growing and, April suggests that one day there may be a unified Power language. Until then, Rob will continue to hate M and use his phone-a-friend card for help in Power Query.

All this and more in this episode. And don’t forget, if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform to help others find our people-centric data podcast.

Also in this Episode:

April Dunnam’s Youtube

Paul Giamatti Le Café de Balzac

The Evolution of SharePoint w Denise Traboona and Adam Harmetz

The Man of a Thousand Jobs w/ Kevin Overstreet

Lego Mindstorms

InfoPath

Into the Dataverse w/ James Oleinik

Power Virtual Agents

GitHub CoPilot and GPT-3

Power Users Microsoft Site

April O’Neil - TMNT