Dave Carroll

I’m a PowerShell developer and enthusiast with interests in DevOps, infrastructure, and retrocomputing.

I started my career nearly 30 years ago at a small Mom-and-Pop computer store, building and repairing home computer systems and peripherals. To put that time into perspective, we rented parallel CD-ROM drives and CD-ROM based games because the drives were cost prohibitive to the average gamer. Since then, I’ve worked in the public and private sectors with 17 years spent in higher education. Currently, I am a DevOps engineer for a finance company and use PowerShell and Python daily.

I began scripting early on, first playing with batch files in DOS, then DCL (heavily modding the login.com for my VMS account) during the few semesters I attended university. I’m not sure when I began writing VBScript, whether it was at that computer store or my next job at an engineering firm as their systems administrator. I definitely honed my skill in VBScript while working in my next position at the community college when I started managing login scripts for the Windows NT 3.51 domains.

Around 2009, the college adopted Microsoft’s Live@EDU, a predecessor to Exchange Online, to provide students with “free” email and document storage. The easiest management of this service happened in a PowerShell (version 2) session with a snap-in. Once I saw the power of PowerShell, I knew that I had to learn more. And so, over the course of several weeks, I converted my homegrown identity management system consisting of more than 10,000 lines of VBScript and interfacing with Active Directory, SunOne LDAP, Oracle DB, MySQL, and more. Each section of code offered new learning opportunities on how to convert VBScript to PowerShell, but ultimately they provided hands-on experience at writing PowerShell scripts and functions.

I have enjoyed wowing coworkers (and myself) with the data I could collect, collate, and control using just a few commands of PowerShell. It has allowed me to automate the management of systems and interface with many others. But I posit that it has also allowed me to control my own career, or at least provided some modicum of control.

I attempt to promote and evangelize PowerShell as often as I can, helping new learners with the basics and participating in the online community. I’ve recently joined the Fediverse and can be found on the Mastodon instance @fosstodon.org/@thedavecarroll.

You can also find me on LinkedIn, in the PowerShell Forums, and (less occasionally now) in the r/PowerShell subreddit.

Feel free to check out my project repos and my gists on GitHub. I hope that you find something useful or informative.

I am much less active on Twitter @thedavecarroll.

Note: I have recently gotten into retrocomputing so you may see some content focused on that. The first computer I owned was a Commodore 64, but I would spend more time on my Apple //c that I received a couple years later. My first IBM compatible laptop had an impressive 640K RAM, which I configured part of as a RAM disk, and dual 1.44MB floppy drives.