From Model Railroads to Azure Architect: Barret Blake's Journey and the Future of AI

Mark Smith: 0:06
Welcome to the MVP show. My intention is that you listen to the stories of these MVP guests and are inspired to become an MVP and bring value to the world through your skills. If you have not checked it out already, I do a YouTube series called how to Become an MVP. The link is in the show notes. With that, let's get on with the show. Today's guest is from Columbus, ohio in the United States. He works at CGI as an Azure Solution Architect, his first award as MVP in 2023. He wears many hats father, husband, manager, developer, gamer, blogger, speaker and model railroader. Wherever possible, he shares his coding expertise with those that value it. You can find links to his bio, social media, et cetera, in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, barrett. Thank you Good to the show, B barrett. Thank you Good to have you on. The thing that caught my eye out of all those things is the railroader piece. Tell us a bit about that.

Barret Blake: 1:14
Yeah, it's just something my dad was into, and so I spent all my years growing up working with him in the basement working on trains. He had a layout that he would keep tearing down and restarting and just never quite finished. And when he passed, he passed on all his trains to me, and now I'm kind of in the same spiral. I've gotten a start, but I need to spend some more time on it.

Mark Smith: 1:39
Is it everything electric?

Barret Blake: 1:41
Yeah, it's all electric. Yeah, yeah, nice nice.

Mark Smith: 1:44
No, I remember childhood. You know memories of going to friends' places that their father was really into and massive areas of rooms covered in railway tracks and villages and landscapes and things like that.

Barret Blake: 1:59
Yeah, unfortunately it's not for the faint of heart. It takes a lot of space and, unfortunately, these days, a lot of money as well.

Mark Smith: 2:04
Yeah, I bet, I bet, I bet. Tell us about family, food and fun the things that you do when you're not tinkering with technology.

Barret Blake: 2:15
Yeah, you know. So I'm married, been married almost 30 years or more than 30 years now, and I've got three kids and just enjoy spending time with them and doing things with them sometimes, but I also enjoy cooking or eating or whatever it might be and just doing whatever comes to mind when I've got that free time.

Mark Smith: 2:35
Nice, nice. And what was your journey into technology? How did you get into tech that you're doing today, type thing?

Barret Blake: 2:44
So I mean I've always had a huge interest in computers. My dad would bring home this huge they called it portable computers, but it was essentially the size of a suitcase. It was made by Compaq and he would bring that home sometimes on the weekends. It was this huge thing with this little five-inch amber screen and he would use the old audio modem to connect to his work and do some work on the weekends. And I kind of kick-started it.

Barret Blake: 3:09
And then he brought home a Sinclair ZX81, which was the first computer that we had in our house, with a whopping 1K of memory, and that was a long time ago. It just kind of kicked off my love of computers. I've been into them ever since I went to college a little bit, but college wasn't for me the first time around kind of right out of high school and I dropped out and got married and spent a few years doing this and that and then in my 30s I decided it was time to get a career change and went back and finished my degree and I've been a professional developer almost 20 years now.

Mark Smith: 3:44
Wow, wow, wow. And when you say professional developer, do you stick with a particular language? Has it always been in the Microsoft arena or have you dabbled all over the landscape?

Barret Blake: 3:58
My professional career has been almost entirely with Microsoft Stack, but with a lot of JavaScript as well. But other than JavaScript, yeah, it's been almost entirely Microsoft, so mostly C Sharp I did. My first professional job was actually VB, vbnet, you know 1.1. And after that it's been C Sharp ever since C Sharp and T-SQL.

Mark Smith: 4:18
Interesting. Tell us about being a Azure solution architect. What does that involve? You obviously also do stuff in the business application space of Microsoft, but tell us kind of you know, what was your journey to becoming a solution architect? Because I find it's kind of one of those goals that a lot of consultants have right they might start off as a developer, but their goal is ultimately they want to become a solution architect, or they start off as a functional consultant, they want to become a solution architect. So what do you see that journey is from? You know, and what was the kind of that transition into the solution architecture role in your mind? What did you go through?

Barret Blake: 5:04
Yeah. So for me it really started almost 10 years ago when I was brought into a small startup company. There was about seven employees eight employees at the time and they'd had this application that somebody created for them as really simple web forms. It did okay, but it looked terrible. It wasn't scalable and it wasn't hosted on the cloud. It was hosted on a server in somebody's closet in their house somewhere. So they brought me in to re-architect it from the ground up and to turn it into something that could be scalable, that moved it into the cloud and to build up a software development team around that. So at that job I was part developer, part manager, part architect, pretty much did everything across the board. And over the next couple of years I re-architected the solution. We built up a development team of about seven people that reported to me and we got it out into Azure and deployed and got it working really well for a while. So that was kind of the start of what really got me into wanting to design things full-time.

Barret Blake: 6:08
After about four years I left that company because they went out of business, but I moved on to another one where I was kind of again the same kind of hat, although it was more. I did some architecture and some development and management as well over the next four years as a consultant position at my previous employer, and then I, when I moved to cgi uh, you know that was I was brought on mainly to be an architect and that's a lot of what I've been doing. But you know, I find that I spend a lot of time doing hands-on development as well. So it's kind of kind of been that kind of a journey for me. So it was one of those things that started of necessity and what I was doing at the startup and it's just something that I enjoy doing. I don't want to be a full-time developer anymore. I want to spend some time with the design side of things and creating solutions and design those things for them.

Mark Smith: 6:55
Nice and tell me about CGI. What does CGI do as a company, where does it operate in the world and what's its focus?

Barret Blake: 7:05
Yeah, it's a strictly consulting firm. Its headquarters are in Canada, but they've got offices in like 35 countries. It's like I think it's like the third largest consulting company in the world for IT's consultings, something like that. I think they like to call it the largest company nobody's ever heard of in the consulting space. But yeah, so I mean, we have offices all over the place. My office just happens to be in Ohio, but it's all strictly consulting. You know, we go out to clients and create solutions for them.

Mark Smith: 7:38
And when you say tech is that, I take it. It's just not Microsoft. We're talking about AWS, sap, google Cloud. Are we talking about the entire kind of cloud ecosystem? As part of the consulting remit for CGI?

Barret Blake: 7:52
Yeah, I mean across the entire company. They do pretty much anything, although my team is all strictly NET space Azure in what we're doing.

Mark Smith: 8:01
So where's your touchpoint with Power Platform?

Barret Blake: 8:33
So that kind of started about four or five years ago at my previous position. There was a need for come up with the automation of some solutions and there wasn't really any. On the team that I was on. There wasn't any experience in that at the time and the client that we were looking to place that with was looking for Microsoft. They were a Microsoft shop, so they were looking for a solution around that.

Barret Blake: 8:55
So I started delving into Power Automate and it's something that I'd looked at a little bit prior to that, over the months prior to that, because I saw it as a great opportunity, although it was something I was trying to use for personal use and it's not really well suited for personal use, although you can do some things.

Barret Blake: 9:12
But you know, I really started delving into it so that we could implement it for the client and it just. I developed a great love for it and just really the Power Platform in general, but Power Automate specifically is what I'm MVP for, so it's something that I really put a lot of focus on. I thought you know I'm learning a lot of great stuff about this. Maybe I should start sharing some of that stuff. I thought you know I'm learning a lot of great stuff about this. Maybe I should start sharing some of that stuff. So I started speaking, started blogging and just talking to people in general about you know, here's all these cool things that I'm learning. Here's something that, for a professional automation platform, is just one of the best things that you could use, and here's how it can be a benefit to you. So that's why I really started pushing it.

Mark Smith: 9:50
I like it why? That's why I started really starting pushing it. I like it why Power Automate? Though? Why wouldn't you, being a developer, being very familiar with the Azure resources, just build Logic Apps instead of Power Automate?

Barret Blake: 10:03
Well, I mean, each of them has their place. So you know, power Automate is designed for the small tasks. You know the automating building a, you know doing a small email list, or you know moving a little bit of data here and there. Logic Apps is more like Power Automate on steroids or vice versa, however you want to look at it. You know, logic Apps is for those things where you need to deal with millions of records or hundreds of thousands of records, you know, and Power Automate's where you know maybe a few hundred to a few thousand records, kind of thing. So really they're almost identical in their purpose and what they do is just the scale. Really, you know, if it's small scale, if it's personal stuff, if it's, you know, minor automation stuff, then you go with Power Automate. If you need something with big scale, then you go to Logic Apps.

Mark Smith: 10:47
Nice, nice. And what are your thoughts on Power Automate Desktop?

Barret Blake: 10:53
It's really handy if you have. You know, a lot of companies still have these old legacy applications, whether it's a terminal or a VB6 app or something like that. Maybe it's something somebody opens up once a day, runs a command or two and then exits and they do the same thing day after day after day. Power Automate Desktop is fantastic for that. It's something where it can open the application for you don't have to have any interaction at all. It can open it up, run the process, close it out and you've got somebody that's spending an hour or two a day doing these things that are just mind-numbingly tedious and you can automate that and not have to deal with that.

Mark Smith: 11:31
Yeah, and so I take it. In that scenario, you would typically deploy that VB app, as an example, to a cloud environment, maybe a VM or something, and then you would have it run on there. Right, it wouldn't need to be. Oh, somebody needed to get their desktop turned on, so to speak, for the scripts to run right.

Barret Blake: 11:55
Yeah, you could do it that way, or you could have, you know, if you've got an old machine sitting around that nobody's using anymore, that's another great one that you could put you know, instead of you know, investing in a VM in the cloud, you know, just you know, make use of that old equipment, just have it sitting there and Power Automate can run it. It doesn't just have it sitting there and Power Automate can run it. You don't have to do anything, you don't have to be logged in, depending on the license you're using. But, yeah, power Automate Desktop is really good for that and you can put it just about anywhere.

Mark Smith: 12:23
Yeah, so Windows 11 has it installed by default, right.

Barret Blake: 12:28
Yeah, it does nowadays.

Mark Smith: 12:29
Do you think Microsoft did that because they expect more personal application of it, as in, so that, rather than you know an enterprise play where it's you know, extracting data from maybe an old system and updating another system, etc. Do you see it as more the intention there is, yeah, for people to create a level of automation on the actual, their real, you know, on their laptop, their desktop, that type of thing, when that, when it's switched on I think that's the eventual goal.

Barret Blake: 13:00
I don't think it's there yet. For one thing, it's not real visible to people. I mean, yeah, you'll see the little icon down there in the taskbar, but there's really nothing that tells you what it is or what it does. People just notice, hey, that's there, what's that doing? And there hasn't really been any real promotion of it.

Barret Blake: 13:17
You know, as far as hey, there's this thing and I don't know that there's going to be, especially with the implementation of Copilot for Windows that's coming very soon, I really think a lot of that kind of stuff. Maybe Copilot will make use of it in the background. But because of you know the limitations of Power Automate Desktop, especially in that, yeah, it's great for automation, but you have to kind of be hands-off when it's running or you can screw up what it's doing. So I think it's one of those things that they can implement it a little bit better so that it runs more transparently in the background so you're not messing it up. If you're doing something while it's running, then I think it has a lot of potential for that, but I just don't think it's quite there yet.

Mark Smith: 14:05
Even though they've been throwing it onto Windows 11 machines, you know, by default, like you say, yeah, I'm wondering if that was part of a stabilization strategy. You know, get any kind of furballs sorted out, because it's the copilot on the desktop that I see really taking advantage of that Right. So so, using, yeah, you know I've done some work in Copilot desktop more as demos et cetera, and I found, you know, you've got to hold your tongue the right way and you know, get a lot of stuff right for it to always run. Get a lot of stuff right for it to always run. You know, if you're going to, for example, go to a website, put in some parameters, get a result back and then scrape that data off the website and use it somewhere else, you're going to have to make sure there's some consistency and, of course, ways of capturing the data being, maybe in a different format all of a sudden on that other website. But I see the use case you know is I've had a discussion recently on LinkedIn back and forth with folks around the maturity of AI and the use of email, and I just feel it's very rudimentary at the moment. I would, in my vista of the world being, is that for every email that entered my inbox that before I even read it, a drafted response to that email would be done for me to check over and validate before I hit the send button. That's a kind of sophistication where at the moment it's kind of like it creates a block of text response but the formatting's off. It doesn't look like my email, it doesn't have my email signature and it doesn't look like my email. It doesn't have an email signature and it doesn't look like naturally I'm sending it and I just think it's like po, it's a proof of concept, right, it's not? Would I? Would I replace my daily activity now because it's you know? Am I going to really save time? And so I just wonder if you know we're going to a world? And of where?

Mark Smith: 15:58
Here's the other one. Is that imagine the RPA watching all your interactions on your computer and device, as in, really as part of that co-pilot extension. And then it says you know what? I've noticed you do this pattern of things. You always watch the, you know, look at these three websites when you get up in the morning and everything. And you know you seem to scan and you're looking for specific things.

Mark Smith: 16:25
I've noticed this pattern and now. I've optimized it for you. Here they are, here's the sound bites, and in fact I know you like listening to an audio, so I'll play the audio as soon as you give me the signal. Right, I'm like I've got it already. You don't have to navigate around, do all that kind of moving, you know, and then apply to email, apply to calendar hey, you know, you've got this calendar thing coming up and I notice that you're not at your computer. I'm going to send you a message to your mobile, your watch or something like that, right? So really, I'm wondering if that's the world we're going to live in and that it needs RPA on the desktop to be that kind of listener, looking for the patterns, then making the suggestions, and then, ultimately, I think it'll get to the point that, as humans, we might get lazy and just say handle it. You know, because you've learned it. You've learned how I do it, you learned how I respond. Handle it. I don't know, just be dreaming.

Barret Blake: 17:17
I mean, I think that would be great.

Barret Blake: 17:18
I mean, that was you know originally.

Barret Blake: 17:19
If you think back to it, that was the promise of things like Cortana and Siri when they first came out is to be this personal assistant to to watch things and to to, you know, recognize those patterns and create something for you.

Barret Blake: 17:33
And unfortunately it wasn't ready, it wasn't there yet. But I am seeing, with Copilot and even, for instance, specifically in Power Automate, they've got a new process that they're kind of in preview now, where it will actually review the processes that you've got running you know all of your flows and recommend suggestions for improvement, ways that it can do better. So again, I see these little steps moving closer and closer to that true personal assistant. But you get that eternal battle between in order to be an effective personal assistant, you have to give it access to all of your information, but at the same time, people are screaming about the privacy and trying to find that balance between the two. In order to make it effective, it has to have access, but until you can do that, until you can effectively make sure that it's secure and safe, it's that balance that they haven't quite found yet and it isn't quite there.

Mark Smith: 18:36
The AI model has to go on hardware, localized hardware, right, not in the cloud. Um, I, I think for that personalized use case and I specifically didn't say an llm because it's not necessarily going to be an llm, because they're really more a cloud thing um, you know a small language model that is designed specifically for personal productivity and personalization. Who knows that? Therefore, you know the data sits on my network not, or on my computer not, and I choose a case-by-case baseness who I share that data with.

Mark Smith: 19:12
Because you know, personally I've been keeping my data for nigh on 20 years now, every email, every receipt, every medical appointment that I went to, and I've just been storing it away. Storing it away because I believe that this day will come that I can give you know my personal ai, that information, and train it, if you like, on understanding me. So it can be. It can, in sense of the word, become my digital twin. Right, it understands me to a degree and of course, I wouldn't want to necessarily chuck that in the cloud, where companies can go bust, security can get breached and you know I want to keep that local.

Barret Blake: 19:55
That's almost a weekly event getting your data stolen. My personal data has been stolen probably 12 times in the past three years, just with various company breaches. It just feels like the way between companies and even the government, because the IRS lost my data one time too. It's crazy. It's the world that we're in right now, these days, and trying to find that solution I think is going to be difficult even now with all the advances we've got.

Mark Smith: 20:25
Yeah, and the medical industry is where I've seen a lot of it lately, right, data breaches. I just saw that a ransomware of $22 million was paid out just recently for a health agency that had been compromised, and so they paid it just so their data didn't get out. In my part of the world, in Australia, we had a major health care. They thought the ransomware folks were bluffing and they published the data and it involved people had to get new passports, people had to get new medical IDs you know deeply personal medical data around having children and pregnancy. All this was all just published and they even published the transcripts between the medical agency and the ransomware folks and they were like, if you like, if you can think of it like this, the ransomware people consider this as a business to them, not an ethical business, but they are very business orientated in how they're conducting their business and I think that people just see it as like, oh, it's a fly-by-night hacker.

Mark Smith: 21:41
If you're going to extort $22 million, you're very sophisticated, right? You're not a script kitty or anything like that, or somebody that stumbled upon something to get somewhere. You're being very deliberate in your actions when you're commanding those type of budgets. So, yeah, become an MVP right. What changed? How did you get nominated? What do you recommend to others wanting to become an MVP?

Barret Blake: 22:07
Yeah, I mean, for me it wasn't something that I was particularly interested in. You know, I would see I'd go to conferences I've been going to conferences for a long time and you would see MVPs, you'd hear MVPs talking. But you know, it's like, well, I don't think that I my attitude was, I don't think I had anything to offer. So, you know, I didn't think that there was any point in me pursuing that because I thought, eh, you know, it's just me, I'm, I'm, I'm nobody, um. But you know, as I started over the last, you know, five or six years, getting into speaking, going, you know, speaking at conferences instead of just attending them, you know starting to do more blogging and things like that, you know, a couple of people noticed, and you know I had a couple of people that I knew who were MVPs in the Columbus area, who you know said hey, you know, you really ought to pursue this, and you know, we think that you would make a good candidate and at the same time, not my direct boss, but my boss's boss was also an MVP at the time and he agreed to that as well. And so, you know, I thought what the heck, I'll go after it and pursue it and so you know, I got nominated and I filled out the information and stuff and I was selected and you know I'm really glad that I did because I've seen that it has given me a much broader view into the community, given me a much broader view into the community and also given me many opportunities to contribute back to the community. You know, I thought just speaking to blogs or user groups would be enough, or speaking sorry to conferences and user groups would be enough. And you know, like last year I had the opportunity to actually be at Build and be part of the experts exchange. You know where I was actually there sharing my knowledge, talking to people about Power Automate, and I had some really fantastic conversations with people who had questions about, specifically, ai builders. What I was talking about with people there and just that opportunity just was amazing to me. So I'm really glad that it's something that I pursued.

Barret Blake: 24:06
And I think so many of us in the community had this like imposter syndrome. We think, oh, I don't have anything to offer, I'm not that great. I look at what other people are contributing. I think I'm nowhere near that.

Barret Blake: 24:17
But you know, everybody has something to offer and if you just want to take the opportunity and the effort to do it, that, if you just want to take the opportunity and the effort to do it, that's something that I would recommend to anybody who's involved in the Microsoft community especially. But you know, and other companies have the equivalent kind of thing. So you know, if Microsoft's not your thing, you know, find out what it is for the technologies that you're working on, find out what the equivalent is and go after it. Because I think, even if you feel like you're repeating things that everybody else has been saying, because there are other fantastic MVPs for Power Automate who put out so much even now, I feel they put out so much better content than I do and contribute much more to the community. But everybody has something to say and everybody has something to contribute. So you know, if you, if you feel in any way, shape or form that you want to give back to the community, it's not worth pursuing.

Mark Smith: 25:18
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If you like the show and want to be a supporter, thanks again and see you next time. Thank you.