You can tell that it’s the beginning of the conference session confirmation season as I’ve had another acceptance on a session that I have submitted to a conference, this time to the London leg of Microsoft’s Ignite on Tour conference on Feb 26th – 27th at the Excel London. The session that I will be delivering is a new to me session called “Using Azure for Good - the story behind mhasl.

Looking through my emails & twitter on Sunday I was pleasantly surprised to see these two items popup First batch of speaker confirmations has been sent out. We will announce the first 60 sessions in the coming week on our new site! Early bird ticket sale will start on January 21! #techorama pic.twitter.com/l6YRKXiFxY — Techorama (@TechoramaBE) January 13, 2019 Followed closely with the following email From everything I have heard about Techorama, it looks to be a good conference and I am certainly looking forward to visiting Belgium :-)

As promised in my last post - I wanted to let you know that the Call for Speakers for PSDay 2019, to be held on September 30th, at etcVenues in Birmingham, is now open. The Call for speakers form is located over on Sessionize & we are looking for sessions for topics as listed is this post from last years PSDay Call for speakers and to be of 60 minutes in length for the main conference sessions, however unlike last year we are also accepting submissions for the post-conference Workshop Training day that we intend on putting on Tuesday 1st October 2019, also at etcVenues.

This year, we as the collective behind the UK PowerShell & DevOps User Groups, are running the third PSDayUK event, the only Conference that is totally Dedicated to PowerShell here in the UK & will be held on Monday September 30th at etcVenues, Birmingham. I have already been asked by a few people about why we have decided to move the event this year, and a small part of that comes down to the overall event financials as running an event like PSDay or even the larger PowerShell Conferences like PSConf Asia, PSConf EU and also the US PowerShell & DevOps summit are not cheap events to run, and that is not including any time that myself and the other organisers put in behind the scenes, above and beyond our day jobs, to bring events like this & the PowerShell User Groups to you all around the UK.

With 2018 now being basically over, its time to reflect a bit, and well lets say that overall in the grand scheme of things it’s been a pretty good year. Like any year there’s been ups, there’s been downs, there’s been lots of travel, laughter, tears, sun, rain etc etc. All in all, it’s safe to say that there’s been a bit of everything this year. 2018 will for many reasons stick out to me for years to come as the year that started building the foundations for my upcoming thirties, and yes you did read that right, upcoming thirties, and here are some of the reasons why (in no specific order, mainly because I could not decide on how I should order them)

I nearly didn’t start writing this mainly as I’ve found it difficult to get back into writing, let alone be in the right mindset to want to write at all. This partially stemmed out from struggling with injury last year. Thankfully, 2018 has been much much kinder to me, and I’m glad to say I am no longer struggling with at least the physical injury, that aside I intend to start getting back into the rhythm of writing once again, something that should come more and more frequently over the upcoming weeks and months.

Well the Title says it all in as few words as possible but I wanted to just expand briefly on this new chapter. As of the beginning of September I will be leaving dotmailer after a fantastic 6 months here and this was a decision that was not easy to make as there are many interesting & exciting things happening at dotmailer in the upcoming few years & as such they are currently undergoing a huge increase in their tech team, I would reccommend that if you are looking for a new role in the London/Croydon area & are interested in DevOps and working with a predominantly all Azure environment to have a look at the roles that they have advertised at http://careers.

This year, we as the collective behind the UK PowerShell & DevOps User Groups, are running the second PSDayUK event, the only Conference that is totally Dedicated to PowerShell here in the UK & will be held on October 10th at CodeNode, London. You can find more info about at PSDay.UK including being able to purchase tickets & the eventual schedule once published in the upcoming weeks. We will constantly be releasing information about PSDay as we approach the time for the event via various methods of social media including via our Twitter Account @psdayuk which I would highly recommend you follow if you want to be kept in the loop of what is coming to PSDay.

I have been absent from the Technical world for a short while, and in that time I have has a few people reach out and advise me that this blog has been down, due to an expired SSL cert. Simple enough fix & well ‘I’m BACK’ Be on the watch for a series of blog articles to follow, over the course of the next few weeks, with a number of fun & technical items to be revealed, as well as some hints at some plans to be revealed, which is starting to make it look like it’s going to be a very fun filled 2018.

So this year the MVP program had a bit of a change to how it handled the renewal and awarding process, a change that I fully supported, as it would allow for the program to become, in my own opinion, more agile and therefore recognise more and more memebers of the amazing community on a more reasonable, and sustainable, cycle process. My only gripe, and this is so minor that I can look at it and laugh at it, as it only really affected me in a personal manner, was that the change to the renewal cycle meant that this year I got a free extension of 3 months from April till July (yay) but I lost the receiving the award as an early birthday present from Microsoft like I had for my 26th last year.