I’ve been interested in learning more about functional C#, and how it differs from the 
OOP style C# that I’ve been doing for years. Ed Charbeneau gave a talk on this topic at CodeMash back in January, the main lesson being how to score a poker game using C# and functional principals and the samples. In this blog entry I will be reviewing a few of the functional principals I took away from the presentation— there are many more but here’s a short list: Continue reading “Functional Programming with C#”
The State of the IT Staffing Market
According to the 2018 Staffing Growth Assessment, the IT staffing industry generated roughly 59 Billion dollars back in 2016. The industry is projected to grow by 4% 2018, which would mean more money for everybody, right?
Not exactly. According to SIA the market is becoming increasingly complex and competitive. While it remains true that much of the market is driven by buyer demand for flexibility, scalibilty and reduced risks, the talent required just isn’t available. Skill shortages make it much more difficult for clients to find candidates they need. In addition, digital disruption and transformation has increased the need for more flexible, short term contracts. Continue reading “The State of the IT Staffing Market”
IBS Employee Highlight: Patrick Tiettmeyer
Patrick is an IBS Account Executive and his been with the company for over 2 and half years now. Patrick’s worked in sales before, but IBS was his introduction to the world of IT staffing. His background in customer service has allowed him to build a number of partnerships with a variety of clients during his short time at the company. Continue reading “IBS Employee Highlight: Patrick Tiettmeyer”
Challenges Testing in Agile
Though a number of organizations and businesses have implemented some sort of QA practice into their development cycle, a large percentage of them still do not have a dedicated resource handling testing. This means they’re taking developers with a specialized skillset away from what they do best to focus on QA. While many organizations have incorporated agile into their development process, they have not done so in their QA process. Continue reading “Challenges Testing in Agile”
IBS Office Highlight: Downtown Chicago
Recently we spoke with Branch Manager Ryan Sturgis about working out of the Downtown Chicago market. Previously, it was left up to Oak Brook to handle the Downtown market but, given particular trends and changes in the market, it became 
imperative to expand to the city.
Iain McDavid: How did the Downtown Chicago team come about?
Ryan Sturgis: Well Downtown Chicago is very, very different in terms of the talent it’s yielding. And given trends with how newer generations and the new workforce are living: Most of them are staying in city. Especially the top technologist, they’re not moving out to the suburbs. Conversely, our original IBS Oak Brook was primarily suburban focused. Continue reading “IBS Office Highlight: Downtown Chicago”
Employers Prioritize Problem Solving Skills
Problem-solving skills are often cited an important qualification for position openings. This should come as no surprise, but what’s interesting is that was cited more often than technical skills. In this report from HackerRank, 94% of the IT employers surveyed consider problem solving skills a priority when hiring, while 55% mentioned programming proficiency. Debugging, system design and performance optimization ranked highly as well.
It should be noted that smaller companies do place more importance on program proficiency (or less importance on problem solving) than larger ones. One explanation is “the right knowledge of frameworks is more important for startups since they need to launch code quickly, and frameworks help developers push code faster.” See the report for the full analysis.
Flow Modern Approvals
Beginner Flow Lessons Learned
We have a business scenario that centers on filling out a word template and 
getting approvals. The Project Charter (which is the word template in my case) is typically filled out by one person and the approvals are generally a formality.
With the above in mind, I started on my journey to learning Flow. The focus is on the Flow Modern Approvals using a SharePoint Online Document Library. Here are my findings:
- General
All flows stay active 30 days and then expire.
While writing this blog, I found an article on setting the expiration time on a card.
“Developers can now embed actions in their emails or notifications, elevating user engagement with their services and increasing organizational productivity. Note – Actionable Messages is available only on the Outlook web app and on the desktop version of Outlook 2016. For the latter, you can install the latest update to get Actionable Messages functionality.
Start an Approval Card
- General
You have to manually add a field to show response info/workflow status (flow variable flow approval has been responded to) status
Update workflow status field in flow This is a single line of text.
You need to add the condition using the Responses object created when you select “Start an Approval.
Everyone from list
Stays in “Not Completed” state until everyone has replied or expires after 30 days with no activity – provided you didn’t change this particular setting.
Sources:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/flow/parallel-modern-approvals
https://collab365.community/7-problems-will-encounter-using-microsoft-flow-including-workarounds/
