Personal on Isaac Levin

Building a PresenceLight

isaac@isaaclevin.com (Isaac Levin) — Tue, 19 May 2020 21:00:00 -0200

I Did A Thing

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a fairly large "tinkerer", as in, someone who spends a good amount time trying out new things, but eventually gets bored quickly and moves on. One of the things that I have always been a fan of is productivity enhancements, to coincide with my laziness. Due to this, I have created a fair amount of things, but never truly finished any personal project. This time, I actually finished something (I mean as much as you can actually finish something these days) and to be honest, I am pretty proud of it. I have offically launched [PresenceLight](url to store), a Windows Desktop application written in .NET Core 5 that allows folks to manage smart lights in their home. Right now, it works with [LIFX](https://www.lifx.com/)/[Phillips Hue](https://www2.meethue.com/en-us) lights and allows you to do things like set the color of the lights to your Availability in Microsoft Teams, your Windows 10 theme, or frankly a color you just want the lights to be. You can install PresenceLight from the [Microsoft Store](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/presencelight/9nffkd8gznl7), [Chocolatey](https://chocolatey.org/packages/PresenceLight/), on the [Releases tab of the GitHub repo](https://github.com/isaacrlevin/PresenceLight/releases) and from the new [Windows Package Manager](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/package-manager). I think one of the things we struggle with as developers is that we aren't good enough to do certain things, imposter syndrome and all that, but we truly have the ability to build great things. I hope that the fact a lazy developer built something that is actually useful to other people besides me encourages people to try to do the same. Ok, enough of this, on to the tech!

Finding Your Motivation

As someone who has worked from home for a fair amount of time in my career (more than half to be exact), one of things that has always intrigued me is how to let your family know when you are "free" vs "busy" as one of the difficult balancing acts of working from home is being able to focus on work tasks. Since I have 2 small kids, this is even more essential. In the past, I used a program called [Skyue](https://blog.thoughtstuff.co.uk/2016/12/announcing-skyue-a-free-skype-for-business-integration-with-phillips-hue/), a free tool built my Microsoft MVP [Tom Morgan](https://twitter.com/tomorgan) to broadcast your Skype for Business status to a Phillips Hue Light, and it was perfect. I used that tool for a long time, but eventually that came to an end when I started using Microsoft Teams, which eventually replaced Skype for Business. I was bummed as there was nothing comparable to Skyue for Teams, and because of the way that Teams set and retrieved Presence (the new term for status), it seemed like it wasn't possible.

Behold the Presence Api

Around November of 2019, I saw some rumblings in UserVoice of exposing Teams Presence via Microsoft Graph, I was curious. Basically the ask was simple, “Let me get Teams Presence via some Api”. I read the thread and saw that someone from Microsoft was commenting, so I did what any self-righteous Microsoftie would do, I bothered him. I found him on Teams and asked him for some more detail, and he was kind enough to tell me that Presence would be available in the beta endpoint of Graph in December, so I waited, and then I saw this . Huge shoutout to Vinod Ravichandran for being so nice to me!!

Developer Loop My Blog with GitHub CodeSpaces

isaac@isaaclevin.com (Isaac Levin) — Fri, 08 May 2020 11:15:58 -0400

Intro to GitHub Codespaces / Setup

GitHub Codespaces was introduced at GitHub Satellite 2020 during the keynote and it showcased a new functionality available to users with push permission in a repository. Said users will be able to create a development instance, known as a “codespace” that will clone your repositoty and load all your configurations you have set in dot files. What codespaces is in summary is a version of Visual Studio Code that runs in the browser (just like the Visual Studio tool of the same name), that you can launch via a button available on your repo’s UI.

Building My Blog with GitHub Actions

isaac@isaaclevin.com (Isaac Levin) — Wed, 08 Jan 2020 08:25:05 -0400

So I Changed My DevOps

As some may know, I already had a fully working CI/CD process for my blog and it was running on Azure Pipelines. As someone that is always learning and wanting to play with a new tool, I was pretty intrigued when GitHub Actions was formally announced at GitHub Universe. I wanted to see how challenging it would be to move my DevOps process from Azure Pipelines to GitHub Actions and it was not hard at all.

How I Built A Blog

isaac@isaaclevin.com (Isaac Levin) — Thu, 25 Apr 2019 08:25:05 -0400

I have updated my blog to use GitHub Actions for Ci/CD, check out this post to learn more!

Why a Post on This?

I have been asked a few times why I decided to build a blog and more importantly, what I did to build a blog that was lightweight, easy to modify (i.e. add posts) and most importantly, is cheap. This is how I approached it, and I understand that some people have more criteria when they look to create a blog, but I am a simple man with simple needs. Remembering the previous version of this blog was an Server-Side rendered Angular 6 application with an ASP.NET Core backend with Azure SQL holding all the data, there was tons of code to write and maintain, and when things did not work (a gist not loading properly for example), I had to debug the issue, which at times took away from building content. So with this criteria, I decided to adopt the following implementation for my blog:

Blog will be a Static Website (plain HTML, CSS, JS)
Blog will be deployed to Azure Blog Storage for hosting
Site will utilize a domain purchased through Azure DNS
Azure CDN will be configured to serve site as efficiently as possible
CloudFlare will direct traffic to site in certain scenarios
CI/CD will be configured using Azure DevOps to push commits to Blob Storage

Well I Work At Microsoft Now

isaac@isaaclevin.com (Isaac Levin) — Sun, 07 Jan 2018 11:13:32 -0400

New Beginnings

I have accepted a position to join Microsoft in the Premier Services Division. My role will be Application Development Manager (ADM) and I will be responsible for helping our customers reach their full potential using Microsoft Tools and Resources. I am immensly excited to start this journey and continue to grow as a developer/technology enthusiast.

For a software developer, one who focuses on .NET, C#, and other goodness on the web, Microsoft is where the magic happens. For me to be able to be a small part of that magic making mechanism is incredibly humbling and I am so grateful to all the people who have helped me in reaching this moment.

My first blog post

isaac@isaaclevin.com (Isaac Levin) — Sat, 29 Jul 2017 11:15:58 -0400

Hello there,

So my name is Isaac, and I am blogging now, thanks for stopping by. Why am I doing something that literally everyone is doing? I guess you can say it was caused by my trip to Microsoft Build 2017. Throughout my career, I have built LOB apps. This usually doesn’t give the oppurtunity to use the latest and greatest tech and tools. After seeing all the fun stuff going on in the Web ecosystem, I decided I wanted to be more invloved. I have learned a few interesting things and I want to share them with anyone that comes across this place. Hopefully it will lead people to share thier interests and knowledge as well…..