My name is Michael Simmons, and I do love PowerShell. During a Windows Vista training session in Spring of 2007, I was looking around Microsoft’s downloads page, and there it was. At the time, all I knew about it was that it had “power” in the name, and it was used for administration. That was good enough for a download, at least.
My job at the time was desktop administrator, so this seemed like a perfect new technology for me. Soon I became known around our desktop support department as “the PowerShell expert”. Unfortunately, my budding love affair with my new scripting language and shell was not enough to encourage my coworkers to share my enthusiasm.
As I kept learning more about what PowerShell was capable of and developing my scripting skills, I realized that not only was PowerShell capable of doing so much, but by using PowerShell I was capable of doing so much more!
Before too long I went from my department’s “powershell expert” to their “scripting genius” – Though really it’s less of me being a genius and more of nobody else doing it. Why didn’t my coworkers get excited about PowerShell like me? I cant think of any reason not to script, and I can’t think of a good reason not to update your skills if you’re writing .BAT files.
My intention with I Love PowerShell is to be a helpful place to learn Powershell from an admin/tech support perspective.
Where PowerShell Took Me
I didn’t start out as aa developer by trade, and while PowerShell was my gateway to the .NET framework and object-oriented programming n C#, I’m was far from an experienced dev. Mostly I was driven to have the most impact with the fewest lines of code – keep it simple, and move from one problem to the next!
What I didn’t know when I started this journey was that the bigger industry was also changing – and bringing in some of the same concepts – repeatability, codifying solutions, and managing IT one-off tasks like they are engineering problems to solve.
Without realizing it, I was transitioning into a DevOps role.
Each role along the way, as I progressed from
“Help Desk / Desktop Support”
— > Server / System Administrator
— > Server / System Engineer
— > DevOps Engineer
— > Director, DevOps
—- > Senior Consultant, Cloud Infrastructure Services
— > Principal Consultant, Application Innovation
It was my philosophy and practice that I established and learned while using PowerShell!
What I Love PowerShell Is Now
I Love PowerShell began as a place for administrators learning to automate their work. Today it explores a larger question: what happens to automation engineering when AI can generate the code, but still needs human experience to determine what is correct, safe, and worth automating?
