PowerShell + DevOps Summit 2018

Another Summit has come and gone, and as always it was great! This year I submitted two speaking topics and was extremely excited when one of them was selected. I had submitted a topic on PowerShell Plaster (which was selected) and another on PowerShell CICD pipelines. I am planning on doing some write ups here on both of them so stay tuned. I will probably make the Plaster write up a one part entry but will likely split the CICD pipelines into a series as there is a lot more to it!

For the 3rd year in a row of going, the Summit again was better than the previous year. This year the format was the most refined yet, having the keynote sessions and PowerShell team lightning demos all day Monday. Jeffrey Snover and Bruce Payette had great presentations. Jeffrey’s presentation was all about “Digital Transformation” which was great as it is very relevant to what is going on for me at work these days. Bruce’s presentation went into a brief history of PowerShell and how some of the design decisions were made that make the language what it is today.

Tuesday through Thursday were speaker sessions with Thursday ending with the Iron Scripter games. The speakers blew me away this year. I found myself continually stumped between attending 3 sessions as the topics were so good. There were so many I wish I could have gone to that I just couldn’t make. Fortunately this year had a professional recording crew present to film them for the PowerShell.org YouTube channel so I’ll eventually get to see them!

As far as my presentation went, I think overall it went well and I am excited to see the video so I can see what to improve for future speaking opportunities. I feel like I had a pretty good turn out, and hopefully was able to teach people a thing or two about Plaster. The feedback should be in soon fingers crossed! I would speak again in a heartbeat, it was an amazing experience and I love opportunities to share knowledge and teach people something new. I also think I am going to try to make my best effort to do more topics for the Boston PowerShell User Group.

As always the Summit was a great time to catch up with old friends from the years prior, and just talk shop (or anything) with them, the PowerShell team, or the PowerShell.org folks. I won a PowerShell in Action book to boot at Richard Siddaway’s session.

Summit 2019 is already sounding like it’s going to blow the last ones out of the water again. I am extremely excited about the direction PowerShell.org has been moving to continue giving back to the industry. The scholarship program has been a huge success and 2019 will be the start of On Ramp. On Ramp is going to be a conference within a conference of sorts, where 40 people can sign up to learn PowerShell from the masters! The idea is that they will be at the technical level to attend future Summits and also be able to start helping others learn! One exciting thing is that each On Ramp attendee will have a buddy, a regular Summit goer, who they can bounce questions off of throughout the conference if they need clarification or help on a certain topic (more on this in future posts!).

My presentation from Summit 2018!

Blog Update (ephos.github.io 2.0)

First thing, my blog looks a lot different as I finally settled on a theme I dig! I am sure I will continue to tweak it over time, I love turning knobs and refining things. One thing driving me crazy is the way the pictures are set, some long ones scroll off the screen. I also think the code blocks are a little narrow and need to find a way to make them a little better. I’ll fix these things soon.

I will admit, I feel that I started it in 2017, and it just flopped (entirely through my own lack of really doing anything with it). This years Summit was really a kick in the ol’ keister to get me to want to start giving back more to the community outside of work and my immediate circles. I am going to make an effort to update this a lot more often!