Welcome to My PowerShell Blog

Greetings fellow PowerShell aficionados!

I feel I must begin with a confession: I was not an early adopter of PowerShell.

I began using PowerShell because I had no other choice. I needed to manage the Live@EDU environment at the college where I worked. Who had time to learn something that was only going to be used with that particular setup? Not this guy. Boy, was I wrong.

The more I needed to do with my environment, the more PowerShell quietly raised its hand.

In the summer of 2010, I took on the challenge of forcing myself to learn PowerShell by way of converting a complex set of VBScript scripts into PowerShell. In a few short weeks, perhaps with a couple all-nighters, I had crafted a replacement solution that connected to Oracle, Microsoft SQL, and MySQL databases. It interfaced with Active Directory, Live@EDU, and Sun One LDAP. It used a .Net log4j logging and dot sourced modularized code (some of which were my own functions). It was an amazing homebrew identity management solution.

Each year after that, my PowerShell skills grew and grew. I had/have a PowerShell session open basically all of the time. As much as I could, I tried using PowerShell commands instead of the GUI.

In 2012, I started working with someone that loved PowerShell as much as I did. We challenged each other and learned from it. I wrote functions and dot-sourced them in my profile. I started dabbling in modules, but just didn’t make the time to delve fully into them.

Over the last couple years, I switched from PowerShell ISE to VS Code, started using git repositories (internal and GitHub), and created my first few real modules.

And I’ve decided to start blogging about PowerShell.

I’ve had the domain anovelidea.org since early 2000. If you want a break from PowerShell and IT in general, you can check out my other website.