This April’s Fool’s Day, inspired by the classic prank, Cat Facts, I decided to create a SMS chatbot that would spam people with “Matt Facts“. I don’t normally do much pranking, but this seemed like a good opportunity to build a silly little chatbot and have a bit of harmless fun. What People Said The […]
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Announcing MattFacts™
UPDATE: Happy April fools’ day! The team here at matthewfoy.ca is excited to announce a new subscription-based service for our loyal customers: MattFacts™, the best way to stay up-to-date, while on-the-go. (Or– during these trying times– while at home.) MattFacts™ delivers fun, Matt-related facts. With a MattFacts™ subscription you can expect to: Be armed with […]
Does Ottawa Have Relatively Bad Public Transportation?
OC Transpo gets a bad rap. Just today a colleague was telling me that they heard that Ottawa was one of Canada’s worst cities in terms of public transportation according to some ranking in 2019. I know we all love to complain about OC Transpo, but this came as a surprise to me because at […]
Reformation or Revolution: Is Basic Income the Solution?
I came across an interesting quote, while doing research for this article, that seemed like an interesting way to frame the concepts I want to explore: I’m a capitalist, and I believe that universal basic income is necessary for capitalism to continue. Andrew Yang – Should the Government Give Everyone $1,000 a Month? (2019) The […]
Crazy Pixels
Ever since I first laid eyes on Conway’s Game of Life, I’ve been in love with the idea of cellular automatons: small, distinct units that follow some simple, fundamental rules to create beautiful, complex, and strange patterns working together. This prototype was originally inspired by an article I read about cellular automatons, or rather, a video of […]
How to Troubleshoot
Curious about what goes on in the mind of a troubleshooter?
How to Quickly Extract an Option Set to a Text File
Every so often, you need to get a dump of all the labels and values of an Option Set from Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (aka CRM). If the Option Set only has a few options this can be done by hand very quickly. However, for larger lists, we need to get creative. To do this […]
Encapsulate Your Scope When Looping With Asynchronous Functions
When using for loops in JavaScript, sometimes you can encounter some unexpected behaviour. First, a simple for loop– No tricks: As anyone would expect, this will print out 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 to the console. Now, what if we are operating asynchronously? Next, let’s essentially do the same thing, except with a 1 second […]
Why I Don’t Drive
A personal lifestyle choice that often surprises people is that I don’t own or operate a personal motor vehicle– I don’t even have my license. To the previous generation, this concept is pure anathema, but to me and many of my peers, this is becoming the new normal. Here’s why. 1. It’s not Economical Transportation […]
Worth it?
I was thinking about an old New Yorker cartoon I saw years ago; it’s aged well, and more poignant than ever. Tom Toro sells signed copies of his cartoon on Etsy.