Fabian G. Williams

Qui Non Proficit Deficit: Three Months Offline, Two Apps Shipped, and an AI That Runs a Nonprofit

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR I went heads down for about three months — no LinkedIn, no YouTube, barely any Twitter. In that time I shipped two iOS apps to the App Store, built an autonomous AI assistant that runs a nonprofit’s entire digital presence 24⁄7, and developed a workflow where AI agents scale my output 3-5x. This post is the full story: the career pattern that taught me to recognize seismic shifts, what I actually built, and why I’m back.

Embracing Technology: My Journey at TechCon 365 Dallas 2025

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

🚀 Purpose In today’s fast-paced technology landscape, I found myself immersed in my journey at TechCon 365 Dallas 2025. What used to take me days to achieve now unfolds in merely two hours. This blog explores how technology has reshaped my workflow, allowing more efficient operations while emphasizing the importance of manual oversight along the way. During my preparation for the conference, I utilized multiple technologies including Graph, MCP, and Agents to create a streamlined process.

Agent + Local Model + Evals — One‑Pager

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

🚀 Purpose If you’ve ever wondered how to compare a locally‑hosted LLM with a hosted OpenAI model side‑by‑side, while keeping the whole experiment observable from end‑to‑end, you’re in the right place. This one‑pager walks you through the starter repo that stitches together three distinct paths: Path Stack Observability A .NET 8 + Semantic Kernel + Ollama (local model) Azure Monitor (OTEL) B OpenAI Agents SDK (TypeScript/Node) OpenAI Logs → optional OTLP → Azure Monitor C Python Evals (OpenAI‑provided) Same prompts, same metrics The goal?

Agent-First Commerce: I Built a Website That Sells Like a Sales Team

Sat, 02 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

🛒 Introduction Not selling anything here — just sharing what I built over a weekend using Claude Code, the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) orchestration. The idea was simple: > Could a website behave like a full sales team — not just a storefront, but a conversation-led experience where agents guide, pitch, and close? So I prototyped it. It works. You can test it live right now at fabiangwilliams.

Debugging GenAI with NLWeb and OpenTelemetry: A Real-Time Visibility Win

Wed, 21 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

🧠 Debugging GenAI with NLWeb and OpenTelemetry: A Real-Time Visibility Win “If you can’t see it, you can’t debug it.” That’s been the challenge with GenAI and Copilot-style plugins — until now. 🎯 Goal I wanted to trace and troubleshoot my Copilot agent plugin activity using OpenTelemetry. The stretch goal? Pipe that into a natural-language search experience using NLWeb, so I could ask questions like: “What plugins were used?

Vibe Coding with AI – Best Practices for Every Project

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

🚀 Introduction This guide captures a modern, evaluation-first approach to building AI-powered projects using tools like GitHub Copilot, Claude, ChatGPT, and local LLMs like LLaMA and DeepSeek. We’ll use AsyncPR — a real-world mobile app project I built and shipped — as the public example. Check out a YouTube short video I did here on the App https://go.fabswill.com/asyncpr-shortintro and feel free to test it out! This guide reflects how I work today: VS Code as my IDE, Copilot for code assist, and running private models on my MacBook when needed for security or speed.

Start with Why: The How, the Why, and the What Behind My Reading Habit

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Why I Read the Way I Do In a world where audiobooks and digital formats are on the rise, I still find myself drawn to the physicality of hardcover books. They’re not just objects—they’re experiences. A hardcover book lasts longer, can be passed down, or gifted to someone who may need its wisdom as much as I did. But my love for hardcovers ties directly to my reading process: I read every book at least twice.

How I Plan to Show Up in 2025 – The Journey from Why to What

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

How I Plan to Show Up in 2025 🚀 As we step into 2025, I’m reflecting on “why” I started this blog and the platforms I contribute to. If you’ve seen my About Me page, you already know that my “why” is rooted in representation, mentorship, and belief – belief in the technology I work on and belief that by showing up, I can help others do the same.

About

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

👋 Hey there, I’m Fabian! I’m here because I believe representation matters. In tech, I know I’m part of an underrepresented class—and that’s exactly why I show up. I believe that by sharing what I learn and voicing my thoughts, I can help pave the way for others. 💻 By day: I’m a Principal Product Manager on the Microsoft 365 Copilot Team focusing on developer experiences and extensibility. I genuinely believe in the products I help build and the impact they can have.

A Product Management Framework for 2024

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

🚀 Introduction After catching up on some podcasts about Product Management, leadership, and effective communication, I felt inspired to document my own approach. This isn’t just for the community – it’s also a way to hold myself accountable as I grow in my product management journey. Product Management is a complex and ever-evolving role. It demands a blend of technical expertise, business acumen, emotional intelligence, and adaptability. Each organization, product, and stage of growth brings its own unique challenges.

Mastering Llama 3.3 – A Deep Dive into Running Local LLMs

Sun, 22 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

🚀 Introduction Over the holiday break, I decided to dive deep into Llama 3.3, running it on my MacBook Pro M3 Max (128GB RAM, 40-core GPU). What started as curiosity quickly turned into a full exploration of local AI models, Semantic Kernel, and API integrations using Microsoft Graph. In this post, I’ll walk you through my setup, the performance differences between Llama 3.3 and other models like Llama 3.170B, and the practical lessons learned along the way.

Getting started with Microsoft Graph Connectors

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Building Custom Connectors with Microsoft Graph: A Starter Guide Welcome to the world of Microsoft Graph Connectors! If you’re looking to seamlessly integrate external data into Microsoft Search, you’ve come to the right place. This blog post is designed for technical audiences new to Microsoft Graph Connectors, providing a step-by-step guide on how to get started with building custom connectors. Let’s dive in! Introduction to Microsoft Graph Connectors Microsoft Graph Connectors offer a bridge between external data sources and Microsoft 365, allowing you to make external content searchable within Microsoft Search.

Start Developing with Microsoft Graph Connectors

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Building inside Microsoft 365 ecosystem with Graph Connectors - A Recipe Book Welcome to the world of Microsoft Graph Connectors! If you’re looking to seamlessly integrate external data into Microsoft Search, you’ve come to the right place. If this is the 1st time you are hearing about Microsoft Graph Connectors, it might be useful to take a look at these 2 earlier post: from Waldek Mastykarz and Majesty Uwagerikpe on Find what you need with Microsoft Graph connectors and from Waldek again Anatomy of a Microsoft Graph Connector This post is a middle of the road post that likely your Data folks, your Security folks, your Business Analyst will ask you questions on so… Let’s dive right in!

Getting started with Microsoft365 Dev

Fri, 21 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Why you should read this post If you are interested in getting started doing software development with Microsoft 365 and in particular with Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft SharePoint, and/or Microsoft Graph,this post gives the cookbook recipie of what you need and where you need to go to get it. I am going to approach it from: Infrastructure ie. what you need to even get started Sample code created from both internal Microsoft as well as contributed from by the Technical Community Video tutorials of solutions curated by the Product Group team I am on at Microsoft Bonus - I will give you the links to Live calls that you can attend with Microsoft that highlights various popular technology stack where you can hear what is out there by the experts as well as ask your troubling keep you up at night questions.

Student Loan Debt Forgiveness Survey Results - 1 Week

Fri, 13 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

TLDR; Checking in on the results after 1 week in the wild of publishing this survey https://www.thatsgreatfeedback.com/studentloandebtforgive to capture feedback on the news that President Biden is considering Student Loan Debt Forgiveness and the results after 1 week are tabulated again. Huge Thanks to all the folks out there who took the time to fill out the brief 9 question Anonymous survey that yielded the below results! We were only able to get (as of the time of this post) 55 folks to respond 😊 to the survey.

Student Loan Debt Forgiveness Survey Results

Sun, 08 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

TLDR; I posted on May 07, 2022 this survey https://www.thatsgreatfeedback.com/studentloandebtforgive to seek feedback on the news that President Biden is considering Student Loan Debt Forgiveness as reported on Fox as well as Fortune and the 1st Results after 24 hour are in! Here is what people had to say Huge Thanks to all the folks out there who took the time to fill out the brief 9 question Anonymous survey that yielded the below results!

Mask Mandate Survey Results - 1 Week

Fri, 29 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

TLDR; Checking in on the results after 1 week in the wild of publishing this survey https://www.thatsgreatfeedback.com/maskmandatesapril22 about the news Mask Mandate is lifted to capture feedback on how thsi affects you and the results are tabulated again. Huge Thanks to all the folks out there who took the time to fill out the brief 5 question Anonymous survey that yielded the below results! As my good buddy Bill Baer taunted me yesterday & I dont think he would mind me sharing this 😊 ”…the biggest problem…you need a big dataset” Notwithstanding we are now at 84 responses to the survey with 1⁄2 of the response coming in in the 1st 2 days.

Mask Mandate Survey Results

Thu, 21 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

TLDR; I posted on April 20, 2022 this survey https://www.thatsgreatfeedback.com/maskmandatesapril22 about the news Mask Mandate is lifted to capture feedback on how thsi affects you and the results are in! Huge Thanks to all the folks out there who took the time to fill out the brief 5 question Anonymous survey that yielded the below results! The 1st 24 Hours There were 5 questions posed and in one free from response the question asked centered around folks reaction to the federal ruling to lift mask mandates.

ErgoChair 2 Survey Results

Sat, 26 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

TLDR; Working from home can take a toll on you… in many ways… but one of which can be your physical health. Not something you notice immediately but perhaps end of day or perhaps over a period of a few months or heaven forbid… something progressive over a longer period of time. Having a work environment that promotes healthy habits is important and that can be accomplished by injecting some mobility at your desk throughout the day as well as equipping yourselves with ergonomic fixtures such as tables and chairs.

Cultivate a healthy Work from Home - WFH

Sat, 19 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

TLDR; I am now at the time of writing this paragraph 3 days in from replacing my 4-year-old office chair to a new Autonomous Smart Office ErgoChair 2 and so far I am impressed with the features and working my way through using them properly. What do I mean by that? Well, the chair is super customizable in terms of the usual, height, arm rest positions, but it also has customizable features for lumbar support and headrest to name a few.

Understand and Improve our Website value through Microsoft Clarity & Bing

Sat, 22 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

TLDR; A few weeks ago in a corporate team sync one of my colleagues presented information around Microsoft Clarity and I was totally blown away in it’s capabilities as well as its ease of use. According to Microsoft Clarity is a behavioral analysis tool that helps you understand user interactions within your website. I use it to do just that especially for knowing where my users come from, and how they are engaging my content, want to see/hear about my experiences?

2022 Top Three Journey

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

What this is and what this is not This is something new I am trying, this is for me to come back to when I have bad days, when I need to re-focus, and even when I have good days. It is not a goals list, and it not meant to be a retrospective list for 2023. I am going to list 3 things each year that I will try to build upon based on where I am now and where I aspire to be.

Gotcha with CICD and Azure Static WebApps

Thu, 30 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

TLDR; If you are ever in the unfortunate situation where your token thats issued when you create an Azure Static Web App is unobtainable or destroyed and you are trying to CI/CD from your Repo in GitHub you will get an error in your deployment pipeline in GitHub Actions. To remedy the issue you can reset your Token in the Azure Portal and then create a new GitHub Secret in the Repo with the new reset token GUID and you will be all sorted.

Take your outdoor walk to the next level

Tue, 28 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

TLDR; A few days ago I set out for a walk to start my Boxing Day 2021 (December 26) & as usual I donned my AppleWatch and my AirPods to listen to my walk/run playlist as I log my journey on the Strava app. As circumstance would have it I got a new iPhone over the holidays and had to redo the process of pairing my ancilliary devices such as my AirPods.

Manage your Time with Graph in Calendar Events

Mon, 24 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Why you should read this post Do you find yourself thinking 🤔 wouldnt it be easy to just copy an event on your calendar and paste it to a new location if everything is the same except the time you need it? Well, I tried to do that and from the calendar in the regular thick Outlook Client and I was not able. Later on however after some research I did find an option if I used Outlook Web Access (OWA) or Outlook Progressive Web App (PWA) to Duplicate Event as seen below which gets me what to what I wanted to do.

Azure Web App DNS Gotcha

Sat, 15 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Why you should read this post Are you contemplating 🤔 or have you built a Static Web Application using Microsoft Azure Static Web Apps and do you plan to use an Apex Domain as a part of your URL. 😳 In plain english that means do you plan to access your website by using https://sitenamehere.com without the www? If so then keep reading please. 😌 For what should be a simple task, I faced a GOTCHA 🔥 on 2 different levels that I’d like to share with you, Ive outlined them below, even though I have listed 3 items below the 3rd is more of an observation:

Microsoft Graph and Python

Mon, 10 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Why you should read this post If you are interested in Microsoft Graph and how it can work with Python this post gives two examples of an art of the possible. In this post i will be addressing the following topics: Using MSAL libraries in Python Using 2 different Authentication Flows to gain access to Microsoft Graph resources Bonus - Access to my GitHub repo where you can get the code as well as a Jupyter Notebook to runs this on your own Wiring this all up This is not very onerous, in fact if you have ever played with Python, its the simplicity that is really astounding.

A New Day

Sun, 02 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Why read this post? I wanted to start a new Blog primarily because my focus and direction have shifted from the perspective I have had for the last decade plus. What do I mean by that? 🤔 While I am still a member of the technical community that I have been so proud to be a part of for the last almost 15 years, previously that vantage point was that of an independent voice.

Tweets and Vids of Fabian

Sat, 01 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

As I retire my old blog Fabian Williams the Architect for this new format I am tinkering with the concept of Azure Static Web Sites usign HUGO templating . Seems pretty cool so far!!! this is all hosted on a Github Repo using Markdown and GitHub Actions for CICD into Azure as I create new content.

Markdown Syntax Guide

Fri, 30 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This article offers a sample of basic Markdown syntax that can be used in Hugo content files, also it shows whether basic HTML elements are decorated with CSS in a Hugo theme.

Contact

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000