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.
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 |
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.
Background The Azure Advent Calendar is a collaboration for members of the International #AzureFamily to contribute a video and blog post about a topic of their choice related to the Azure Public Cloud, which was brought to life by Richard Hooper (aka Pixel Robots) & Gregor Suttie two recent UK Azure MVP’s that make up 23 Azure MVP’s out of a total 164 UK MVP’s of which I am one of in the Cloud and Datacenter Management category.
This post is going to be all about Microsoft Ignite and my experience as both a 1st time attendee & a 1st time speaker. There’s going to be a lot to read so I highly recommend you go get a brew sorted (tea, coffee, beer, wine etc) before sitting down to read this post which at over 2600 words is quite a read, and this is just part 1 of 2 which focuses on the lead up to Ignite & not Ignite itself which will come in Pt2 of this series.
You can tell that the end of year conference season is coming up as we’ve just wrapped up PSDayUK, which was a resounding success!
Then this week there are a number of events currently going on, and with some of the Black Marble team, currently at Future Decoded, and some more of the team currently at Techorama Netherlands, this week as well, the office has seemed somewhat quiet.
Then next Saturday (12th October) there is DDD @ Microsoft Reading (which I am attending) and then in just a short few weeks is Evolve Conference, where I will be speaking on Making Operational Azure Management a breeze.
Yet again I’ve had another acceptance on a session that I have submitted to a conference, this time to Microsoft’s flagship conference, Ignite, this year taking place between November 4th - 8th 2019 in Orlando, Florida.
I’ve been accepted for 2 sessions, a 45 minute Breakout session and a 20 minute theatre session, both of which will be brand new to me sessions, and whilst both are completely non-technical, they are incredibly important topics in the Diversity & Inclusion track, something that I have been trying more and more to be better involved with.
After a good few years with the last rather dated look of this blog as per below
I felt that it was time for a bit of an update.
Though this also coincided with some software updates that I needed to implement as well so I thought I’d do a rolling update of theme, software and plugins and luckily most of it went ok (this time round)
Let me know what you think in the comments
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.
Info Share about PSDayUK 2018 - Call for Speakers, Ticket availability & Upcoming Call for Sponsors.
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.