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

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 😁

PowerShell Update Oddness

Updated 2023-04-13 I have been running a dev system for a number of years that has had every Windows Insider build on it since I got this machine back in December 2019, & along the way we’ve seen plenty of new ways for you to get your hands on the latest versions of PowerShell. These also have some additional update mechanisms too, like via the store and Microsoft Update. So I was a tad confused when I’d gotten an update notification in Windows Update for PowerShell Preview, version 7.

2020 & 2021 recap

Where to start…? 2020 - the rise of the pandemic 2020 saw the whole planet have to deal with Covid19 which impacted almost every sector possible, leaving Tech being one of the few with the least amount of impact. Needless to say I was far far too optimistic about how it would pan out and 2020 was pretty much one of the worst years of my life, & I’ve have some pretty bad ones.

Speaking at PSConfEu 2022

I was lucky enough to be one of the chosen speakers for PSConfEu 2022 which wll take place June 20th - 23rd in Vienna, Austria. I will be speaking about Building a High Quality Resource Module (HQRM) and all the surrounding technology that you need to be able to do so. This isn’t a small presentation in the slightest and has lots of areas to cover, and whilst it will be a lot to cover I am confident that I can manage to get all the right information across for this presentation.

Time for a Lick of Paint - v2

After a good few years with the last rather dated look of this blog as was per below I felt that it was time for a bit of an update. This is especially true as that layout wasn’t really all that responsive (in loading as it was so damn slow or for different devices with different resolutions) and as such for 2022 I wanted a cleaner and much quicker site. Also looking back the site isn’t really all that accessible either which to a much bigger problem to me now than it originally was when I picked that theme.

BCC, Distribution Lists & General Email Etiquette

If you work in a big organisation, or like me, are on a number a of cross organisation distribution lists or listservs, then it’s likely that you have some myriad of email rules that route all emails sent to a specific distribution list to a specific folder. This is a good email management practice as you can then filter your searches to a single folder that should just have conversations related to things sent to that distribution list.