Ryan YatesConsultant

Just a dude in his 30's doing things in Tech & trying to break the stigma's around talking about Mental Health
This is the personal blog site of Ryan Yates

In IT - Specialising in PowerShell, Automation, DevOps, Azure & Office 365
Outside of IT - Music, Psychology/Mental Health, Science, Law & Politics
There are 73 posts on this blog

There are currently 8 drafts in progress

Wish 1 of 2024 Granted - No longer homeless!

So its official, I’m no longer homeless! 🎉 Granted it’s not quite ready to move into, but at least that’s the first wish of My 2024 Wishlist post has come true! However, next will come the fun part, making it a home! Over the following weeks & months I’ll need to get these things sorted, flooring, as all prior carpet had been ripped out. I’m gonna go for lino as simple to clean.

2024 - the year of AI, Automation and the Copilots, or is it?

2024 - the year of AI, Automation and the CoPilots Whilst quite self explanatory of a title I want to just highlight my thoughts on why 2024 is the year of AI, Automation and the CoPilots. AI AI is going to help drive immense amount of changes across many areas of our lives. Mostly in good or fun ways but there will, as is always the case, be cases of it’s use not be for ethical or moral reasons.

My 2024 Wishlist

My 2024 wishes - part 1 I have quite a lot of wishes for 2024, and in this post I’ll put the most important ones to me right now and in an update early next year I’ll add some of the others too. Not to be homeless See this post for more details because this impacts everything else for the year ahead like my health, finances and also prospects of getting back into properly enjoying life again & contributing to society as much as I used to do & even more so as this stops me from being able to start & run business/es without making use of a PO BOX or other holding addresses, which I may still make use of.

Here comes another bout of Homelessness

I write this on December 6th 2023, and this post is actually now more than a month+ overdue. Unfortunately, I recently found myself in the no so fun situation where I was given a Section 21 Notice (No fault eviction) by my Landlord, and this has now made me suffer from temporary homelessness, something that yet again has is something I’ve experienced many times before in my life. I have been lucky to some extent that I have some great support around me, both from friends & distant family, but also from my local council, so that I am not on the streets, but temporary shared accommodation, which is something that the UK has done better with in recent times, though I still had to push quite hard to get that support.

Why am I one of the best at what I do?

Why am I one of the best at what I do? I recently was indirectly asked this, and well, I thought about it for a moment and realised that it has also been something that I have regularly asked myself over the years too, perhaps in a slightly different way as often I will ask this question along with the "What do I need to do to be better than I am now?

Installing PowerShell Side by Side for testing purposes

This is part of a series called Using PowerShell in testing in which I intend to showcase lots of different ways that PowerShell can used for all sorts of testing. A prior example would be Building A Lab using Hyper-V and Lability - The End to End Example. First things first, if you are writing code then you will have built up a series of preferences over the years in how you have your machine configure, or actually for many of us that is actually not just one machine but a collection of physical and virtual machines.

A few weeks of downtime - getting signed off sick due to stress

The title really says it all, doesn’t it. Those that know me well know that well things have been tough, a big part of that is my fault, some is accidental fallout that has occurred due to events out of my control. However the reason for this is a bit more compounded by too many things like Currently Jobless I’ve spent months looking for work in tech & even have a M365 Planner board for tracking this project I regularly get emails from recruiters & from Job Boards & get sent things by many people too.

Why did I end up missing Scottish Summit

Firstly, an Apology To all attendees, speakers, volunteers, sponsors & organisers that were looking forward to seeing the session, meeting up & having a natter in the hallway chat, as well as some of the other people that I wanted to try catch up with in Manchester, I can only apologise for having missed the event entirely. I have been a mixture of disappointed, frustrated and upset at myself that I was unable to deliver a session, one that I absolutely love delivering, on Mental Health, because mine was and has been suffering so badly on/off (in waves) in recent times.

So you want to start a User Group

But where do you begin? Note: this is a repost & update with minor edits of the blog post I authored that is hosted on PowerShell.org I’ve blogged about this from the reversed perspective before about finding user groups with a small section about what you can do if your thinking about getting one off the ground which you can read at How to find Local User Groups & events - My Experience and it was only natural to eventually blog from the other side too although this has come up a bit earlier than I had planned to but alas it gets it done Smile

Feedback on the new Microsoft MVP RD and Student Ambassador site

As a former 7 Time MVP for Cloud and Datacenter Management and one of the few that helped in restart the UK PowerShell Community back in 2015 which has lead to many in person and online events, here are a few bits of feedback on the site compared to the last version, feedback that I would have given via the MVP Program previously. Design Feedback Firstly the design looks great, as it looks nice and fresh, which is always a good win with new releases of portals like this.

Why did I choose to write and maintain multiple blogsites

Yeah, Why…..? Many different reasons, however the main one is for future reference, whether this be by me or anyone else that finds the content I throw out useful. However, it also shows a number of huge benefits when you look at content ownership, which you don’t get with platforms like Twitter (never will I ever call it X) FaceBook or other publishing platforms, whether they be public or private.

Musicxmatch and the tracks I am adding or added lyrics to

Recently I have diversified some of my time into a number of different areas, mainly to get back into the habit of doing impactful work so that I can showcase to employers as well as myself that I am ready to work on the big but challenging & importantly the interesting things, or at least those interesting to me. However, that said some projects I will put on the side and not look at them for a while, but they are never truly finished until I decide to archive them or consider them complete.

I will make mistakes, but I will always learn from them

Updated 12th July 2023 & again on 20th August 2023 Word of Warning - this post contains some not so nice language, but it’s use is for impact only!! Read on if you are happy to do so As Linkin Park (One of my favourite bands of all time) started with in the lyrics to in In Between Let me apologise to begin with Let me apologise for what I’m about to say But trying to regain your trust was harder than it seemed

My experience as a 7 time awardee of the Microsoft MVP Award

I’ve blogged before about my involvement with the Microsoft MVP Program, always whilst respecting my NDA, over the years since I was first awarded on April 1st 2016 in the Cloud & Datacenter Management award category & no it wasn’t an April Fools joke. I then was awarded each year since then for the yearly award cycle, including the 2022 award cycle. That said, this post will still respect that NDA to the best of my ability, even though I so could easily break it.

When to start using a new tool - pre v1 or not

This post will be a nice short one that allows you to understand when I take a dependency on a tool in any development of production code and is inspired by this question by Waldek Mastykarzn on twitter For a tool like #Microsoft365 Developer Proxy (https://t.co/sYRAexFJPR), do you care if it's v1.x or v0.x? Does it being pre-v1 make you not use it? If so, why? Asking for a friend 😁