2012 in Review
I started 2012 with a great surprise and the year continued to be one of my busiest.
The year started with my MVP award and spending a lot of time working with Windows 8 Server (before it got its actual product name) and trying to make PowerShell V3 make sense in my hybrid environment. The Greater Milwaukee Script Club and Greater Milwaukee IT Pro User Community both struggled on (Script Club continued thanks to the support of Tim Lemmers at Greenfield PD and the IT pro group due to the efforts of Brian Lewis and Michael Steineke).
March led off with the birth of my son. After that I had a chance to go to the Cascadia IT Conference and teach two PowerShell classes there, as well as meet a great community of people.
April brought a bit of a change of pace with the ForenSecure conference. I had the opportunity to present on the security enhancements in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. After ForenSecure (the next day in fact), I gave a presentation on scritable UI with PowerShell at SQLSaturday 118. April led into May with the PowerShell Deep Dive at TEC 2012. I had two sessions there (PowerShell V3 in Production and Windows Workflow Foundation and PowerShell Workflows for the IT Pro) and learned a ton as well.
May continued with PICC 2012. This was my second year at PICC and I had another day of teaching PowerShell there as well as spending time talking about Windows Server 2012, systems administration and other fun topics with a great group of guys and gals. I also had an opportunity to talk about Windows Server 2012 with the Wisconsin SQL Server Users Group.
June and July passed relatively quietly, focusing on spending some time at home and in the office, working with Server 2012 and PowerShell V3 as they neared Release to Manufacturing (RTM).
August brought me to ThatConference. ThatConference gave me an opportunity to talk to some local (and not so local) developers about some of the cool new features in PowerShell V3.
September and October were spent rolling out Server 2012 RTM (and using PowerShell Worflows to ease configuration and the new Hyper-V commands to perform cross platform migrations).
November brought me to TechOnTap for a day of Powershell with Brian Lewis and Adam Driscoll and a host of local community members, including Jes Borlandand Derek Schauland. The next week, I returned to Appleton to talk about PowerShell with Jes Borland and the FoxPass SQL Server Users Group. The end of November also brought to a close my time as a systems engineer at Edgenet (though for good reasons).
December started off with the start of a dream job, becoming a sysadmin for StackExchange, home of ServerFault and StackOverflow. The euphoria was short lived, though, and it was off to the USENIX LISA conference. LISA was an interesting experience (deserving of it’s own blog post). I taught a PowerShell Fundamentals class there and got to spend time with a ton of great people. Wednesday of that week brought a real surprise. While waiting for two of my co-workers for breakfast, I saw none-other than Bruce Payette (of the PowerShell team) walk by talking to Jim Truher (formerly of the PowerShell team). Shortly thereafter, Jeffrey Snover walks up as well. It turns out the USENIX organization was presenting them an award for the advancement of systems adminitration that PowerShell provides on the Windows platform. I closed out the year getting acclimated to my new work environment and of course dealing with the holidays.
2013 What’s To Come
Now that we are in to 2013, I don’t know what lies ahead, only that it will be interesting! I find a renewal of my MVP status in my email today, so I am so very pleased and humbled to still be a part of that great group of professionals that make up the PowerShell MVPs.