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!!

PresenceLight on Isaac Levin

Building a PresenceLight

I Did A Thing

Finding Your Motivation

Behold the Presence Api