Full-Stack

Spur Reply · Internal Comms Automation

Software Development Intern at Spur Reply (formerly The Spur Group), a Redmond consulting firm. Built a Microsoft Flow newsletter pipeline sending formatted internal comms to 10,000+ employees weekly, plus an HTML/CSS email template library and a marketing-site refresh.

Website

Highlights

A Microsoft Flow pipeline delivered the weekly internal newsletter to 10,000+ employees, replacing a manual process.
Authored the HTML/CSS email template that rendered newsletter content consistently across Outlook, web, and mobile clients.
Shipped a refresh of one of the firm's web properties and several smaller email-automation flows for internal comms.

Stack

Microsoft Flow

HTML

CSS

Java

Visual Studio

Excel

Problem

Spur sent a company-wide newsletter to 10,000+ employees every week, and it was assembled by hand: someone copied content from a structured source into an email template, formatted it, and sent it. It was slow and error-prone. My job was to automate it so it ran on a schedule with no one watching.

Approach

I built the pipeline on Microsoft Flow (now Power Automate), which the firm had already approved, so IT didn't have to sign off on a new service. Flow pulled newsletter content from a structured source, ran it through an HTML/CSS email template I wrote, and sent it to the 10,000+ employee list every week. I also refreshed one of the firm's websites and built a few smaller email automations for other manual comms.

Why these choices

Microsoft Flow: The firm's approved automation tool, so there was nothing new for IT to approve. It gives up some flexibility for speed, which suited a weekly newsletter.
HTML + CSS (email templates): Email clients render HTML inconsistently (Outlook, Gmail, and mobile apps all differ). Writing the template by hand with proven patterns was more reliable than a framework that might look right in a browser and break in someone's inbox.
Visual Studio + Java: The firm's existing tools. Small companion tools used the stack the team already had.
Excel: The source content and distribution lists lived in Excel. Flow reads Excel directly through Microsoft Graph, so the pipeline needed no database in between.