If you’ve found yourself here then you likely have no idea who I am. That of course is not surprising (at least to me). In any event clearly you want to know something about me beyond the obvious things so lets get some stuff out of the way.

Basic stuff

  1. I LOVE PowerShell. I have made more or less a career out of using it to solve problems since I started working with it while it was in beta back in 2006. I am very much an advocate\evangelist for PowerShell.
  2. Any time I find myself doing something more than a few times I almost instinctively start to think about how I can automate it some how.
  3. This monkey I have on my back is named efficiency and I can never get it to go away. I am always looking for faster ways to do stuff. Not in the sense of using aliases or short-cuts, but in terms of making my code run faster. Odds are throughout this blog there will likely be posts about how I’ve adjusted my code to work faster.
  4. I am a huge fan of teaching instead of doing when someone asks for help. If someone asks me for help, odds are I’m going going to come up with some crazy way to solve a problem that might be difficult for someone who is less experienced to understand. Factoid #3 above often goes out the window when I am teaching as writing code efficiently doesn’t always translate into writing it in a way that everyone will understand (at least at first). So if someone asks me for help, generally speaking I’ll not do it for them, but instead provide examples and try to make it a learning experience.
  5. Almost always I am happy to answer any question, unless you’ve caught me on a really bad day. I can (and will) talk about PowerShell indefinitely.
  6. Finally and most importantly, like the Game of Thrones character Jon Snow, I know nothing. If a week goes by where I don’t learn something new then I’ve wasted that week. I am always looking to learn new things and new ways of doing things.

Actual experience

I have been working in Information Technology since the late 90’s. My first job was at a dial up internet service provider providing support for Windows 3.11 and it’s awesome dial-up capabilities. I bounce around for a few years learning a few things along the way (mostly helpdesk and such) until eventually I started working for some larger companies in larger roles (this is the part where I’m making a long story short..the in between really requires a beer or two). The day of my automation birth was ushered in with the Exchange 2007 beta and with it Monad (the original name for PowerShell). Back then the documentation was sparse and the editors limited. Nothing like we have today.

In any event I started a journey of learning PowerShell and grew up as it matured itself. It wasn’t long before I started to find a lot of uses for it in my daily work. My first real big use was when I noticed the people at work who handled account creations did everything by hand (you know..clicking and all that) and I decided that wasn’t cool at all. So on my own time I first started building scripts for them to do these tasks and eventually as I learned more and more about PowerShell I created an entire framework based on PowerShell that is used by many groups today.

In the end this really taught me the value of automation and toolmaking. The amount of time saved by taking manual tasks which are prone to human error and adding some machine intelligence behind it paid off big time and allowed multiple IT departments to focus on other things and also have a much lower degree of error on processes.

If you were to boil down my expertise over the years it would be centered around messaging (specifically Exchange\IronPort\Sendmail\standards protocols), directory services (mostly Active Directory with a heavy bit of LDAP experience), and automation and toolmaking. These days I spend the majority of my time in the directory space and easily 85% of my day is spent with PowerShell writing tools and automation processes.