Shell of an Idea: The Untold History of PowerShell
Don Jones

In Shell of an Idea, the Untold History of PowerShell, by Don Jones, we get an insider’s perspective on the challenges of bringing out software that changes the world.

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Really. PowerShell changed the world. As we learn in Shell of an Idea: the Untold History of PowerShell, it certainly changed Microsoft. Because it was from inside Microsoft that PowerShell had some of its biggest challenges and faced some of its worst critics.

Capturing the History of PowerShell

Jones brings a storyteller’s experience to this look back on those challenges.  Though it’s not just Jones that tells the story. For the most part, he plays the part of a journalist, and lets the stories come from the people that were there on the team.

People like Kenneth Hanson, product manager, Jim Truher and Bruce Payette, who wrote the language, and of course from Jeffrey Snover, the inventor of PowerShell.

And the stories they tell, it turns out, offer a glimpse into something bigger than the struggles of a small team in a huge company.

The Struggles and Successes of the First Version of PowerShell

Shell of an Idea gives us a look at how software teams work. And not just the way they work now, where DevOps and Agile and Scrum are commonplace. It’s a look back at how software teams worked at the dawn of those concepts. When writing code and being a developer was changing.

And it highlights those figures, nameless in this book, that we can resonate with. Political backstabbers, change resistors, naysayers that reply-all to the whole company to tell everyone why your idea won’t work.

But more than the details of any one challenge, it highlights how the right idea is not enough. PowerShell was the right idea. But it needed the right team to make it happen. And it needed both determination and tact to make that idea a reality.

It was especially inspiring to read how the team leadership came up with solutions to problems. From finding a customer (the Exchange team), who needed an automation solution, to getting additional funding by using the India Development Office, you see multiple examples of the team making progress, dealing with setbacks, and having to refocus to get to success.

In one such example, Lee Holmes was having trouble getting approved for talks at security conferences about PowerShell security defense capabilities. Since conferences were focusing on hacking and penetration instead of defense, he delivered a session on “attacking a hardened Windows Server,” in which he spent 2 minutes talking about the attack then the rest of the time talking about how he hardened the system with PowerShell.

There are plenty of humorous stories along the way, such as the developer who claimed a feature would take six weeks, until he was shown the feature could be written in only 13 lines of code. “Oh, you wanted it done that way,” was the developer’s reply. As a parent, I can almost hear my children saying that.

Or the discovery by the team that to get PowerShell released with Windows they would have to pass “seven gates”, only to find that when they passed all seven the eighth gate was just “Hell, no.”

Affecting the Culture of Microsoft

But for all of the details on “how-this-feature” or “why-that-character” that Shell of an Idea: the Untold Story of PowerShell reveals, you’re left wanting just a little bit more.

You can tell how the development of PowerShell, specifically the discipline of the team, helped contribute to the changing culture at Microsoft. After all, when PowerShell was released, it was common to read articles that would refer to Microsoft in terms of their past, as a shadow of its former self. There was no culture of innovation. That was not what Microsoft was known for.

The Microsoft rise to becoming a company that innovates is crystallized by PowerShell. PowerShell was truly revolutionary, and that is on full display in Shell of an Idea, but it stopped short of telling the bigger story of its impact on Microsoft culture.

If that vein had been mined completely, particularly by hearing from executives, managers and architects outside the team about what PowerShell meant to the company and recalling some early stories, it could have added layers to this book which would have moved it outside its niche into a larger book focused on radical business transformation.

It would have been a natural fit to hear Bill Gates’ telling part of the story, how he remembered it.

Because it’s clear after reading Jones and the PowerShell team’s stories, they were enabling the products, empowering the teams and expanding the possibilities for one of the largest company comebacks the world has ever seen.

However, instead of expanding on that, Shell of an Idea makes an abrupt turn, and stops telling the stories of the PowerShell team to tell the impact to community members, MVPs, and Jones’ own story of how he found PowerShell and how it changed his career.

As Long as We’re Looking Back… (Reflections)

Even the chapters on community impact were a good read for a PowerShell user. And they are probably even better the longer you’ve been into PowerShell, as the section on former MVPs and some of the early champions from the community were especially nostalgic.

And the nostalgia, more than anything else, was a special magic in Shell of an Idea: The Untold History of PowerShell that I wasn’t expecting. Jones summed it up perfectly:

There’s a lot of untold story under the shell, and it’s a story I wanted to tell. Much of PowerShell’s core team have moved on to other teams or even to other companies. Nobody’s getting any younger. I felt it was time to capture their stories and the shell’s story while I could still track everyone down.

Jones, Don. Shell of an Idea: The Untold History of PowerShell

It’s true, nobody is getting any younger, and this story gives more than context. It gives clarity to a movement that not everyone knew we were even on when we started (no matter when you started).

To do more, better, faster – to do it the right way. To evangelize it, teach it, to shout it from the rooftops. Because once you’ve been bitten by the PowerShell bug, man does it take hold of you like a drug.

Suddenly everything is about PowerShell. It would be sad if it weren’t the case that it really is the best tool for the job – no matter what the job is.

And to hear the stories from the team that helped build it, that they had been bitten by that same bug, and this is how it changed them. It was a fantastic blast.

Whether you’re new to PowerShell or PowerShell is an old friend to you now, Shell of an Idea: the Untold History of PowerShell is a book that you need to read to better understand just how affected your career has been by this amazing language, and the team that created it.

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