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)
Ryan YatesConsultant
Just a person in their 30's doing things in Tech & trying to break the stigma's around talking about Mental Health
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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
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There are a number of posts on this blog
There are currently many drafts in progress & have been for a long time
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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.
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.
This week has been a busy week for me with the SQLRelay and SQLSat Munich events. It has been full of fun especially seeing as for SQL Relay we had the fun bus for travels between the different venues all across the UK.
The week started of as most other weeks do and that was with me at home in Derby on Monday Morning. This was followed by me jumping on the train to Birmingham around 11am Monday Morning for the first leg in the SQL Relay tour where I presented a completely new and fully non-technical session, something that is a little bit out of my comfort zone of the typical more heavily technically focused sessions that I’m used to delivering.
Proud to announce that Speaker Submissions are being accepted for PSConfEU 2017 – you can submit your session proposals via the following form
A few things to note about this year’s submission and selection process
We have a hard cut of date of the end of Sunday December 1st – submissions must be in by this time or will not be accepted. This is because we will have a selection committee gathering during the week commencing Monday 2nd December The members of the selection committee we all vote for our favourite sessions.
Today I’m going to share with you a little but simple tip to enable you to do more Side by Side testing of PowerShell v6 with you current installed version in a simpler and less error prone manner.
Firstly we will create a new environmental variable which we can do in a number of ways but I quite doing it this way as its easy enough to script
Function Update-PS6Path {
So last October I attended the first SharePoint Saturday in Munich which was great event and if you want to you can read up about my experience in this previous post.
However it seems that in October this year I’ll be returning to Munich for the SQL Saturday event where I’ll be delivering my Why & how to implement PowerShell DSC for SQL Server session.
There has been a number of changes to the xSQLServer Resource over at https://github.
**Updated August 23rd 2016 as there was a change between 6.0.0.8 & 6.0.0.9 to PSModulePath that I had missed – I will be blogging about this in more detail in a future post but for now check the updated section at the bottom of this post! **
If your like me and you want to test out PowerShell Core on you Windows machines as well as other *nix machines then you may get caught out with this like I did in the upgrade from 6.
If you’ve been under a rock the last few days (or for days/weeks/months depending on when your reading this blog post) then you would have missed that on Thursday August 18th 2016 - Microsoft Open Sourced PowerShell!
Not only did they Open Source PowerShell they have released a Cross-Platform alpha version that can be installed on a variety of Linux Distros as well as a Mac OSX version.
You can read about it in more detail from the Jeffery Snover himself from over at https://azure.
This Sunday I set out to force my blog hosted on Azure to be Https by Default and I mainly made use of the following Article by Troy Hunt on the underlying implementation which makes use of Cloudflare but I’ve also decided to get it set up ready for if I may want to move away from CloudFlare to Azure CDN in future.
There really isn’t to difficult to do this especially if you follow Troy’s post.
So in this blog post I’m going to cover why there is a need to create Functional & Non-Functional Pester Tests for your PowerShell Modules but before I get into the nitty gritty into the whys behind creating both let me explain what the real differences are between the two because it may not be something that you have previously thought about or considered in your journey up until this point.
I had intended that I would be doing a recap type post at the end of every month however I’ve been very busy so haven’t been able to do so for a number of months – that and I had an issue with my blog being offline for a few weeks.
Let us start with a recap on the amount of events that I managed to attend and I think that you can see that I did a lot of travelling and attending a number of different user groups.
I have long thought of a way to Automagically create some Pester Tests for the Functions contained in a module that perhaps was developed before Pester was really well known.
At that Point we may have been creating psm1 files that contained a number of nested functions within them. I know for one that I am one that did this / added to existing modules that were built this way – have a look at SPCSPS on Github or aka SharePointPowerShell on CodePlex as one of the first projects that I got involved with in the Open Source world.
I had a discussion last night via twitter with one of the attendees that I met at the Microsoft Cloud Roadshow in London earlier this year and the outcome of the conversation was that although I find it easy to find out about events – this isn’t all that common for others.
So I decided that I would quickly jot down some of the places that can be useful to search to find events that are going on around you.
There will be a time where you are attempting a new task, whether that is personally or professionally and you find yourself having to resort to the documentation of the product to get to the end goal, whether that be to put together a new piece of furniture, preparing an exquisite meal or bashing different bits of software together from different companies or more commonly the same company.
One thing that is common in all these scenarios is that if the documentation is completely missing then you are forced down the road where you take the “pot luck”/”educated” guess to get to the desired end result and sometimes that can lead to some hilarious results, especially if it is in relation to cooking or building furniture.
Warning – this post is over 3800 words long and perhaps should have been split into a series – however I felt it best to keep it together – Make sure you have a brew (or 2) to keep you going throughout reading this
In this post we will be looking at how you can build a VM Lab environment from pretty much scratch. This maybe for testing SharePoint applications, SQL Server, Exchange or could be for additional peace of mind when deploying troublesome patches.
The MVP Award is defined by Microsoft as the below
Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals, or MVPs, are community leaders who’ve demonstrated an exemplary commitment to helping others get the most out of their experience with Microsoft technologies. They share their exceptional passion, real-world knowledge, and technical expertise with the community and with Microsoft.
This means that within the different areas of the Microsoft Stack there are those out there that really believe that the world can be a better place when we come together as a united front and share the knowledge that we have.