Integration Love Story med Andrew Wilson

Introduktion

Hi, Andrew. Thank you for joining us. Glad that you could make it with us today. This is a special episode of Integration Love Story — we are doing the fast ones here at Integrate.

It’s lovely to meet all the people here, and day two has been very interesting after a great day one. Glad you could join us.

Thank you for having me.

You are newly awarded as MVP — congratulations on that. And you’ve also recently been mentioned as a Logic Apps ACE Aviator. That’s a lot of achievements in a really short time. How does it feel?

Deeply honored. Deeply honored. I wasn’t expecting it all to land at the times that it did, so very convenient timing. But genuinely — deeply honored, very chuffed. It’s nice to be part of the community and see all the developments coming through, especially being able to attend Integrate and seeing how things are progressing further. It’s an amazing community to be a part of.

Från Excel och VBA till integration

Tell the audience a little bit about yourself.

My base came from just being infused by technology from the get-go. It actually came from my father. He did a training course and used to develop programs in Microsoft Excel — the spreadsheets would be the database, and he would use VBA behind the scenes to create these applications that would just pop up when you loaded Excel. To me that was just magic. At one point I’m looking at little boxes, and now I’m seeing applications and data literally moving behind the scenes.

I think I was only about 10 at the time. For me it was just dragging boxes and doing nothing useful, but it all sparked from that moment of seeing magic, as it were.

That was the starting point. Then it became: well, how does that distribute? And that’s the core problem. Yes, you could do it in an Excel sheet — but then your neighbor next door, how do they use it? That’s when I took that database and made it an Access database, which then became my A-level project, because why not.

I’ve never heard anyone speak about Excel with that kind of passion. It’s quite something.

I have a soft spot for it. I know all the reasons why you shouldn’t go that route — macro-enabled worksheets, security, scalability — but I still have a very good soft spot for it. You’re so close to the data and you can manipulate it right there and then.

Familjeliv och golf

If you were to introduce yourself to someone at a pub, not talking about tech at all — who is Andrew?

I’d introduce myself as a family man. It’s always been family for me. I’ve got a wife and two kids — and I’ve recently had a little one, four months old at this point. Making sure they’re happy is always first. And if it’s not that, a good game of golf.

Varför Logic Apps — och vad som gör det kraftfullt

You’re recognized as a Logic Apps ACE Aviator. Why do you actually like Logic Apps as a technology?

For me it comes back to before Logic Apps even existed — I love the idea of how do I make systems talk to each other. The integration space is the powerhouse. I can fill in a form, I can do all the front-end goodness, but what happens with that? Where does that go? How do I make sure that everyone else’s ability to work is enhanced? That’s really where integration came through for me.

I started out with BizTalk, and then it became Logic Apps. What made Logic Apps really powerful for me was all those connectors — the ability to take my BizTalk knowledge of how orchestrations flow and apply it there. I’ve got input, I spit it out somewhere else, and I can orchestrate all of these capabilities. But those capabilities were baked-in actions that I could tangibly hold and build upon. No other technology was offering — or still offers, to that degree — that kind of enhanced capability.

Två saker att ta med från Integrate

What are the two things you’ll take away from this Integrate?

Number one is Logic Apps agent loop. That is a new paradigm. Honestly, a new way of doing integrations — full stop. Being in a place where you can do something non-deterministic — just thinking back on some of the deterministic flows I’ve put in place and the decision-making involved, and thinking how I would have done that in a deterministic manner — it just doesn’t compare. One line of natural language instruction versus how many if-statements and compiled orchestration.

Number two is codeful workflows. I’ve seen dictionaries created in Logic Apps that took three minutes to stand up and retrieve just because they were implemented in a programmatic manner, but incorrectly. We changed it and got it down to a twentieth of a second. It was that understanding of how we can bring programming practices in — without having to reimplement everything from scratch — that was the big one for me there.

Råd till den som börjar nu

You’re a senior integrator at Black Marble, and part of that is lifting others with you. What’s your first advice for someone just starting out?

Stay curious. The days of “it’s already been done, why would you bother” — that doesn’t hold. We just watched someone do a card game demo. Why? But why not? That was their ability to go and tinker with something. We’ve just heard some amazing announcements — why not do something silly to learn from them?

You don’t need to wait for the next project or the next opportunity to learn. Find something. It could be silly. People might ask why. What’s the point? That’s how I got into programming — I recreated a calculator. There are many out there already. Why? I had fun. That’s where it all stems from.

Integration Love Story

This podcast is called Integration Love Story. Can you tell us about a moment where you fell in love with integration?

It’s a niche one, because everyone has a complicated relationship with it — and I’m talking about BizTalk.

My first real understanding of the capabilities of integration — the fundamentals — came from BizTalk, which I got into at Black Marble when I was an intern there. We had this really interesting project: myriad distributed solutions that all needed to be integrated together. A whole bunch of flat files, some APIs, bits and pieces going on. It was that understanding of how it all orchestrates together, and taking that curiosity of what’s the power here, how do I do this — it just instilled it in me.

When you see the painting appear on the wall, you think: that makes sense. I love it. There are times you hate it, but you still love it.

I think you need to have that kind of relationship with any space. You need to both hate it and mostly love it.

Thank you, Andrew, for joining us today. We really look forward to a longer conversation later in the year.

Thank you. My pleasure.