Crafting Inclusive Technology with Passion and Community with Cat Schneider

Mark Smith: 0:32
Welcome to the Power Platform Show. Thanks for joining me today. I hope today's guest inspires and educates you on the possibilities of the Microsoft Power Platform. Now let's get on with the show. Today's guest is from Florida in the United States. She works at Hitachi Solutions America as a senior software engineer. She's a co-leader of the Power Platform UI and UX and Accessibility Global User Group. She is an experienced data specialist with the Power Platform, sharepoint and Teams, and she's worked in the public sector for around 15 years. You can find links to her bio and social media in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, kat. Hey, thank you.

Cat Schneider : 1:19
Good to have you on Now. We'll say I'm no longer in the public sector, but I was in the public sector for close to 15 years.

Mark Smith: 1:26
Yeah, as in. That's where you worked right before you were. Yeah.

Cat Schneider : 1:30
Yeah, before I made the jump to the Power Platform.

Mark Smith: 1:34
I love it. I love it Food, family and fun. What do they mean to you?

Cat Schneider : 1:39
Oh, food is one of my happy places Pretty much anything and everything other than seafood, especially. You know, considering I'm in Florida, you would think seafood would be a thing for me, but no, I got over that pretty quickly as a kid Family, just spending time with my family doing things, learning things, whatever, Traveling and all that Fun traveling and yeah, nice, and you obviously do a bit of travel for work as well.

Mark Smith: 2:11
Right, were you most recently at the Power Platform Conference in Europe?

Cat Schneider : 2:15
No, I was not there at that one. I was trying to get to that one. Actually, I was most recently in Canada.

Mark Smith: 2:21
Yeah, what was that one? What's a Canada?

Cat Schneider : 2:24
That was actually for a work trip, it wasn't for a conference. Okay, got to go up there and hang out with M Darcy at a client's office for a day, with m darcy at a client's office for a day, and you know, just got to meet some really cool people from a company that I was some semis formally associated with in my public supper days. Um, beginning to see them on a different side of things.

Mark Smith: 2:48
So nice, kind of nice how did you get into the power platform? How'd you get into the Power Platform? How did you get involved with it?

Cat Schneider : 2:57
So it was actually through a mentoring relationship that I had with the CIO at FDOT while I was working there. Very first meeting that we had, we were talking about you know, what was it that I was interested in? What was I wanting to do with this relationship? How was I wanting to spend the next six months? And you know, kind of what was I working on at the time? And I was like, well, you know, I was actually just in the middle of watching a Power BI video and he was like, really, would you be interested in a license? We happen to have one extra license right now. And I was like, yes, please, spent the next month working in that and then ended up presenting that to the statewide OIT meeting and everybody just went crazy over. It, thought it was the most amazing thing ever. And we ended up starting up a community of practice a couple of months later. So, yeah, it was that. And then straight into Power Apps and Automate.

Mark Smith: 3:58
Wow, so sorry. Where were you working at that time? That was Florida Department of Transportation. Excellent, the Florida Department. So you were in public sector and you started tinkering with Power BI and things just took off.

Cat Schneider : 4:10
Yeah.

Mark Smith: 4:11
That's cool man, that's really cool.

Cat Schneider : 4:13
It went crazy. We were a Tableau agency for the longest time and then ended up just wanting to see what we could do with Power BI and very quickly realized that we had so many more avenues available to us going the Power BI route than staying with Tableau. So we ended up, I think, starting out with 10 users in our community of practice, and by the time I left, which was about two years later, we had over 300 active users in our community of practice.

Mark Smith: 4:46
Wow, that's amazing. So you've used a term now a couple of times community of practice. What is that?

Cat Schneider : 4:52
That was where we were basically teaching ourselves and teaching others within our organization the platform Power BI. And then we eventually because I pushed a lot on OIT I was like, can we please make this a Power Platform community of practice? You know, power BI is great and all, but we are a SharePoint organization. Power Automate and Power Apps is integral in us. You know, doing this, it doesn't make any sense for us to just focus on Power BI, can we please? And so I finally, after enough asking and begging and poking and prodding the right people, I was able to get that to come into fruition. So we had a teams group and then several channels dedicated to the various applications and it's kind of like a stack overflow, except you don't have to try and dumb your information all the way down because you're working with people who know your organization and know your data. So it was. It was nice because people could just go out there drop a question and people could respond that had any kind of information.

Mark Smith: 6:05
So so just give us a highlights tour, whistle-stop tour of public sector to Hitachi.

Cat Schneider : 6:15
So I was present, like I presented, at a Microsoft event that was specific for transportation organizations, and then I presented in a larger regional conference for the various tools that we were using in the Power Platform. And then, shortly after that, I was presenting at the Microsoft Power Platform conference that took place in Orlando in 2022. At that point in time, I had a job offer from one organization and in the middle of that conference, I had a job offer from Microsoft as well. Conference, I had a job offer from Microsoft as well, and I was like mind blown. One, the conference was amazing, but two, I had two job opportunities for the Power Platform at the end of this conference and I had to make a decision. So, wait, I'm out, looked at it both, both organizations and I finally I said thank you, Microsoft, but not right now.

Cat Schneider : 7:17
Um, and so I went with the smaller organization. It was the MSP or what is it? Multi-services, something or other. I forget the nomenclature Yep. Yep Acronyms elude me but um did that for about just about a year and a half before Matthew Devaney reached out to me and said hey, would you be interested in coming to work with me over here at Hitachi? And I was like sure, why not? So we, we did the interview. I talked joel lindstrom and he talks about you all the time. He has nothing but great things to say.

Cat Schneider : 8:01
Um, and then you know, we I've been there since april so, wow, so it's relatively new, a hitachi piece yeah, when I uh was at mvp summit back in, I had actually just left that organization that I went to start with. And then when I got back from MVP Summit, there was a couple more weeks and then I started at Saatchi.

Mark Smith: 8:26
Wow, wow, that's so cool. So if I was to ask you what's top of mind for you right now, we're, you know, into the start of September We've got Power Platform Conference coming up in Vegas. You've done your first half year. What's whirling around in your mind when you look at the next six to 12 months?

Cat Schneider : 8:46
Probably it would have to be like a pro code version of Power Platform, power Apps specifically. So you know, they presented that code view and I think Yannick and myself both got super giddy. I think I sucked all the air out of the room when they announced that because I was like, oh my God, are you kidding me? We can just use YAML and do editing right in the browser Like this is insane, this is incredible. Please can I have this now. So I've been super excited about that and all the possibilities that come from that, because I prefer to build my apps in Visual Studio Code and then bring them back into the Canvas editor for fine tuning if needed. But it's just. I find it a lot easier because I can essentially make snippets of code, put those in there and voila, now I have Canvas components.

Mark Smith: 9:43
That's very cool. In the intro we talked about UI, UX, global user group. So it's interesting because you talk about working in Visual Studio and very much in potentially the code layer of things, but UI and UX is very much at the experience layer, the presentation layer of an application. What are your thoughts in this space? What's happening? Tell us about that user group, why should people get involved with it and what are you seeing happen around this discussion area of UI and UX from the lens of the power platform and I mean that in the broader sense.

Cat Schneider : 10:23
Yeah. So I've always kind of just been interested in accessibility. Just working in the public sector, it is a huge part of anything that I was doing when I was putting anything together to go out into the public. So it was always making sure that whatever web pages we made out there available to anybody, those were hugely accessible. Any documentation, any Florida rules, statutes, whatnot we needed to make them accessible to anybody and everybody, whatnot we needed to make them accessible to anybody and everybody. Because there's a big thing, especially in the state of Florida, is that we've got sunshine laws, which means anything and everything that's made has to be publicly available. So even if it's publicly available, it still requires it to be accessible through federal laws. So I've just always had accessibility like ingrained into anything and everything I've been doing. So it was one of these things where it was like when I see something that's not accessible, it kind of just makes my skin crawl just a little. Yeah yeah, because I'm just like it doesn't take much effort to make something accessible. It's when you don't know what you don't know. That's when it gets to be a bit difficult because you don't know that you haven't made something accessible.

Cat Schneider : 11:43
So I've always kind of wanted to put this group together. I was talking with Christine Kozilewski she's going to murder me for butchering her last name. I was talking to her and Donna at the first Power Platform conference, like we should totally put together a user group specifically dedicated to this, and just the three of us got super busy, never had time to put it together. And so then Charles and Anya they had reached out I want to say, back in April, may sometime about wanting to put together a user group for UX and UI, and they thought it would be really cool for myself to get involved, and I was like, well, 100% down for it.

Cat Schneider : 12:29
Can we also include accessibility and can we make this an official user group? Let's go through the whole process of getting it set up through microsoft and whatnot. So we did that and we've been loving it ever since. We've had two already incredible presenters besides ourselves, because you know, anya and charles themselves are awesome presenters. I usually just try to go for whatever's going to make people excited at the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but you know we've got Donna, sarkar and Sean oh, my goodness, I forget his last name, like Astrakhan.

Mark Smith: 13:08
Yeah, I don't know.

Cat Schneider : 13:09
He's a new MVP, I think, as of last month.

Mark Smith: 13:12
Yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, of course, heck, I hope he doesn't hear me say I don't know who you're talking about. Had a full-on conversation with him the other day.

Cat Schneider : 13:22
Oh.

Mark Smith: 13:23
Yeah.

Cat Schneider : 13:25
But yeah, we've got those two coming up here in a few days and then some really exciting presenters for the next couple of months. Nice few days and then some really exciting presenters for the next couple of months, so nice. I'm just, I'm really excited about this group because it gets gets more people like ui, ux and accessibility at the forefront of their minds whenever they're they're building these applications.

Cat Schneider : 13:47
So and it's not nice it's not just like we don't intend for the user group to be just how do you implement UI, ux and accessibility for the end user, like we're also considering it from the perspective of a fellow developer who may have to come in after you Like making sure that you're also implementing stuff so that those users, the developers themselves, don't just go what is happening here right now?

Mark Smith: 14:19
Yeah, how do you handle things like time zone?

Cat Schneider : 14:23
So right now.

Mark Smith: 14:24
Meaning that you're right across the globe.

Cat Schneider : 14:26
Yeah, you and I were, I think, 12, 10 hours difference, something like that.

Mark Smith: 14:33
Mm-hmm, it's 1 pm my time. Yeahhmm, it's 1 pm my time.

Cat Schneider : 14:35
Yeah, and it's 9 pm my time 9 pm.

Mark Smith: 14:38
Yeah, New York right.

Cat Schneider : 14:40
Yeah, new York time.

Mark Smith: 14:42
But then you've got London, which right now is 2 am, and isn't Anna from London? Yes, and Charles.

Cat Schneider : 14:50
So Charles, I think, is in UK, Anya's in Scotland, yeah, so you know they're. They're on London or British Standard Time, summertime right now. Yep, um, and so we've tried to stick to a general time zone um, we just, which is what like?

Mark Smith: 15:11
what time do you do? You do, you do it live. You use a group.

Cat Schneider : 15:18
I have a whole set of notes here to keep track, so we're trying to go for it. I think it's 3 pm Uh UTC or if the show is on a weekday and 4 pm UTC if it's on a weekend. Um, the only difference is we've got several really incredible speakers who are on your side of the globe that we're trying to get on the show. So we're actually going to change it up a little for December to get it in a time zone that's applicable for them. So it'll be a little later for us and I say a little later, several hours later, but at least it'll be in a time zone that folks in Australia, new Zealand, philippines, those areas it makes more sense for them.

Mark Smith: 16:47
Nice and it pretty much exploded, didn't it, when that user group was launched. Didn't like 300 odd people like sign up pretty much straight away.

Cat Schneider : 16:55
So our very first meeting, we had over 300, I think 50 people who'd registered for that event and over 150 people actually attended, and I was just like okay, like yes, this is great. We were all kind of freaking out. We're like, oh my God, if we have 350 people on the first call, that's going. This is great. Like we were all kind of freaking out. We're like, oh my God, if we have 350 people on the first call, that's going to be a lot.

Mark Smith: 17:20
Yeah, yeah, doesn't it show, though there is an absolute gap in the market for this conversation? 100%. It's interesting. I was talking with a PM at Microsoft and he was on the design side of the things and he was lamenting he wished that for every engineer, developer, engineer in Microsoft there was a UI UX designer. The product would be absolutely amazing, but unfortunately that ratio is not there. Yeah, and for years.

Mark Smith: 17:53
It's funny, when you talked about usability before, I remember sit in seattle years ago having the whole discussion around what was then dynamic crm not being compliant to the various just the simple usability kind of like, just the baseline of usability standards that were available.

Mark Smith: 18:13
Yeah, um, and it's funny because in recent months, I have experienced usability, I suppose, a lot more from screen reader point of view. So something I've only found out really properly, I suppose, this year is that I do best from auditory listening, not from actual eyeball reading on screen, and so so, for example, I just had a a about a 50 page pdf document that I needed to go through. Typically in the past I would be lucky to get to page two as a technical document. Um, it was around um, geotechnical stuff, which is, of course, not my subject matter expertise area which could get very dry quickly. I'm able to drop it into a screen reader and stay riveted for the full 50 pages because, oh, I get it. I can see where this is going, it makes sense to me and those really hard to pronounce words the screen reader does really good.

Cat Schneider : 19:11
Yeah, you don't have to worry about, you know, getting tripped up. Like how does that? That's what is that saying.

Mark Smith: 19:16
Why is my brain trying to go down here when I'm up here and yeah, but now I notice when I go to read websites, particularly blog sites, heaps of them from a screen reading perspective. Whenever you come to like a picture in the content, it will then go and start reading out the html or css, which is just totally disruptive when you're like in the flow of whatever the post is about and you just see how important it is, like that's something from visually, nobody would see, you know, any impediment in the design. Yet from usability perspective I'm always like, ah, shit, now I've entered and like when it's every like paragraph that there's a new image.

Mark Smith: 19:57
Well, yeah, that's painful, yeah yeah, and now it's important.

Cat Schneider : 20:01
Yeah, the screen readers. Now you can actually tell them you know, skip over images or you know only, yeah, only say you know the important part of the specific image. Like they've got all kinds of different tools now.

Mark Smith: 20:15
So mine, mine does all that, but for some reason, if if that site has not been like you know it's, sometimes it just injects it in yeah, man, yeah, that would be rough.

Mark Smith: 20:27
I I must say that it's painful yeah, and so that's why I'm a big advocate of both interface design and user experience design, because I think they're just so. One of the quotes I've used for years with the consultants I've worked with is that long after you're gone from the project, someone is going to be using this interface, this experience you've created, and if they're cursing whoever invented this, that's bad. Right, that's bad, because what you might find quick and easy to do and you checked a box, that that feature was added, or that line or that text, or that checkbox or that dropdown, whatever it was but if you've not done it in a way that you've understood how this person's going to use it every day, you could have just added five minutes to their life, as in, I sucked out of their life doing this because you didn't think about that. Yeah.

Cat Schneider : 21:19
It was something that you just needed to get this thing done. You needed to tick that box to say this is in there, and you didn't think about how's the person going to use it? Nine times out of 10, you're going to end up in a situation where somebody's trying to create some other application to not have to deal with yours.

Mark Smith: 21:37
I'm interested to know how you handle conferences. You know you had the deal come together for you at conferences. And a couple of things. One, how do you prepare to speak at a conference? What's your strategy? Do you start with a blank slide deck? Or you know what is the process that you go through. And then what do you do at conferences? And what I mean by that is what fun extracurriculars do I have? Not so much that, but like, how do you make sure that you come away from a conference feeling like and it is that that that was so well worth going to, that was amazing. Like I want to do that again. That's a no-brainer that I'm going to be back next year. Yeah, tell me a bit about that.

Cat Schneider : 22:23
So all right. So presenting it really just depends on the topic. So if I've already got a presentation that I've done on the topic, I might use bits and pieces of it. Um, sometimes I'll start from a blank slate and incorporate the overarching ideal, but not necessarily any previous content, and other times it's well conference. They said they wanted this particular bit, so I'll just do that Most of the time. I'm still working on trying to get selected for specific conferences our platform conference.

Mark Smith: 23:07
I thought you did get selected for it.

Cat Schneider : 23:09
No, I wish, I so wish I had gotten it, but it seems like or I heard some rumor that there was not as many community-specific sessions that were selected for this one.

Mark Smith: 23:21
What's community mean, as in non-Microsoft delivered sessions.

Cat Schneider : 23:25
Yeah, it's more like people-based sessions versus technical sessions.

Mark Smith: 23:32
Gotcha, and so there was less selected for this event.

Cat Schneider : 23:35
Yeah, and a lot of what the mode, or I should say the majority of the content that I put up is more people-based and community-based than it is technical-based. There are several sessions that I'll put in that are technical-based, but there's also several sessions in this particular conference that are almost the exact same as what I had put in, but they're from more prominent speakers, people that they're familiar with. So I'm like one of these days I'm going to get in there.

Mark Smith: 24:08
Are you still going, though? Oh yeah, a hundred percent, yeah, yeah, yeah, it'll be awesome. Oh yeah, 100%, yeah, it'll be awesome.

Cat Schneider : 24:14
I think probably the thing for me as far as like, what is it that I do at conferences that I just have to go back again. Probably the dinosaur situation that I started out with Chris Huntingford at Microsoft Power Platform Conference 2022 gotta run around as a dinosaur. It's kind of expected now. So shenanigans is a big thing. Making sure that you know I'm bringing the shenanigans, which.

Mark Smith: 24:43
Nice.

Cat Schneider : 24:44
It's been said that it's kind of expected, like if I don't have shenanigans, like at some point in time that there's something wrong I've been kidnapped, body snatched something. So we'll definitely have the Velociraptor at this conference coming up.

Mark Smith: 25:03
Nice.

Cat Schneider : 25:04
But yeah, no, it's really just about having fun and getting out there and seeing people and you know just meeting and greeting.

Mark Smith: 25:13
Are you an attendee and what I mean by that. You're going because of the sessions, yeah, or are you going because of the people?

Cat Schneider : 25:20
I do go because of the sessions, but I go because of the people, yeah, the people that are at the conferences, which is crazy because I am wholly an introvert. So when people are like what I'm like no, I am INFP like I am an introvert very much, conferences do take it out of me. So when I get back from them I'm like please nobody look for me or ask anything of me for the next month, like just yeah please don't.

Cat Schneider : 26:07
But I think what happens is my ADHD pulls me into that extroverted type personality, if you will.

Mark Smith: 26:17
For a period of time.

Cat Schneider : 26:18
And it's enough to drain my social battery, enough where I don't want to see anybody for a month, but I just I enjoy the dopamine rush that I get from attending him.

Mark Smith: 26:29
So yeah, nice, yeah, nice. Final question I have for you is around the power platform as a whole and where are you investing your time in the next six months, like, where are you going deeper in the technology? Forget about what you're doing consulting for customers and things like that but what areas are you drilling into and building your skill set out in at this time?

Cat Schneider : 26:53
so there's a couple of things I like I've been saying, I think, for the last year and a half. I was going to go for the pl200 and I have yet to go for the pl200 okay. So there's that, but mostly what I'm trying to do it. It sort of started out as a consultant project but turned into a pet project. That's now also turned back into a consulting project, um, where I'm starting to do essentially a code review for power apps, like how do I tell from this particular Canvas app what I'm working with? So I definitely want to do the PL 200 route, but I'm more concerned with, when I open up an app, what are the things that I should be concerned with? What are my data sources? How performant is my application? Where are the things, my gotchas and ha-has, and how is it that I can get this information out of here in a quick, easy and reliable manner so that I can start to understand what I'm working with and be able to work with it a lot quicker?

Mark Smith: 28:08
Are you creating a tool to do this?

Cat Schneider : 28:14
a tool to do this. Funny enough, it's an excel workbook. Excel excel is my first love and I don't know that I will ever give it up, but yeah, I'm. I'm using excel to do that it's a versatile tool it very much is. I was actually building, quote unquote, power apps in Excel before power apps was a thing.

Mark Smith: 28:36
Yeah, no, I get that. I get that. I have been known to play with tools outside the ecosystem. My current favorites that I'm learning at the moment are makecom, which is Power Automate, and a thing called Airtable Airtable.

Cat Schneider : 28:53
Airtable, so itable.

Mark Smith: 28:54
Airtable, so it's like Excel on steroids. So it's like an Excel that's also a database, but like massively API driven, oh wow.

Cat Schneider : 29:02
Yeah.

Mark Smith: 29:06
I spent probably eight hours yesterday on modeling stuff out and using APIs and branching and various things to, yeah, build out automations, particularly automations that involve AI. Oh, wow, but yeah, I could you know. In my mind I'm like you could be doing this in Power Automate and you could be doing this in Power Apps, but it's funny how, yeah, sometimes other tools can be quite attractive. Oh yeah, they have their things that make them, I suppose, real super easy to use. And when you're just building personal projects and not for a customer, how you handle security is different.

Cat Schneider : 29:44
Yeah, right, exactly Because there's only one authenticated member it's me, there's nobody else and therefore you know you handle things differently yeah, when it's, you know um not client or public facing or any of those type of things yeah, I will say um fun thing that I'm actually getting myself into right now is I'm learning electronics wow, that's so cool so I found this organization called inventorio and they teach you basically how to incorporate Arduino boards, raspberry Pis, you name it, how to incorporate that with Python, and I think C sharp is what they teach you, and they do it using storyline formats and they do it using storyline formats.

Cat Schneider : 30:35
So the one that I first got about a year and a half ago is called 30 Days Lost in Space and the story is you're on a ship, you're on your way to meet up with the rest of the crew and you've crash landed on a planet and now you need to you know, ship fixed in order to be able to meet back up with the rest of your crew. And it's like it teaches you you know how to make led lights light up and how to you know do all these fancy, crazy things and so cool, all in an effort so that I can learn how to you know connect my power apps and power automates to the real world, my kiln that I have for making ceramics, so that I can actually have a fully automated kiln, so that I can, you know, make my ceramics how I want to make my ceramics.

Mark Smith: 31:32
That is so cool. I love that. Thank you, Kat. I'll see you in a couple of weeks. Yes, sir.

Cat Schneider : 31:40
Thank you for having me.

Mark Smith: 31:42
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If there's a guest you'd like to see on the show, please message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out buymeacoffeecom. Forward slash NZ365guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the stars.