Last fall, I was encouraged by some prominent members of the Power Platform community to volunteer as a speaker for the Powerful Devs Conference, an all-virtual event hosted by the Microsoft Reactor group that aims to help developers leverage the Power Platform to build applications faster and with far less effort. Never one to shy away from an opportunity to share some Joy Opinions™, I said yes!
I tapped my friend Denisse Luna to come on this journey with me. We met on a large scale Power Platform development factory (a project which fully consumed my life for 1.5 years). I quickly recognized Denisse as someone I wanted to keep in my close network forever. Her skills and experience, personality and creativity just make her a joy to collaborate with. And hey, Denisse once asked me how to get more involved in the community— so what better way than to drag her along with me in a speaker submission?
Denisse was so instrumental in the success of this session! The topic was her idea, and she wrote the outline, content, script and even created the cloud flow configurations. I helped too with slide design and script tweaks and presentation tips. We spent nights and weekends on finalizing our content and dry runs, including a hilarious session where we designed the world’s worst cloud flow definition to use as our “what not to do” example.
In The Developer’s Approach to Power Automate, seasoned professional developers and newcomers to low-code alike can learn to uplevel their Power Automate cloud flows with best practices and tips from two speakers with a combined 24 years of functional and technical experience in Dynamics CRM, Dataverse and Power Platform.
- For pro devs who are dabbling in low code, these approaches & tips will help you infuse your wealth of experience into cloud flow definitions using the right tools to optimize for performance and efficiency.
- For low code makers (shout out to my Functional Consultants fam!), adapting these best practices into every cloud flow will ensure your automations are taking the right actions at the right time, without unnecessary slowdowns or billable actions.
Come watch Denisse help me out with my cloud flow that’s gone totally off the rails 😱 and teach me how to bring a pro dev mindset to my low code automations.
Joy of Power Apps 
This sounds like such a fun session—and honestly a super relevant topic right now.
I really like the angle of bringing a “pro dev mindset” into Power Automate. That gap between traditional development and low-code is still very real, and sessions like this help bridge it in a practical way. Too often, flows get built to work but not necessarily to scale, perform efficiently, or stay maintainable over time.
The “world’s worst cloud flow” example is brilliant by the way 😄 Those kinds of anti-pattern demos tend to stick way more than just showing best practices in isolation. I’m sure a lot of people will recognize their own flows in that example.
Also, huge +1 on the collaboration aspect here. You can really tell when a session is built by people who’ve worked together in real-world projects—it brings a level of depth and honesty that’s hard to replicate otherwise. The mix of functional and technical experience is exactly what the Power Platform space needs more of.
Definitely adding this to my watch list—especially curious to see how you approach performance optimization and avoiding unnecessary actions, since that’s something that becomes critical (and expensive) at scale.
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