First of all, I would like to thank you all! Thanks for visiting my site and responding to things I post here and on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and GitHub. 10K views from March until now and just above 5,5K visitors. Happy to see these numbers! In this blog post, I will tell you some more things about me and why I like PowerShell 🙂

History

As you can read on my about page, I’ve been in IT for 26 years and hopefully many more. I’ve had different roles and interests throughout the years, but I always enjoyed and wanted to learn more about scripting.

It all started with running simple .bat files, creating/deleting files or directories, or just simple command-line things that would run after each other so that I wouldn’t have to type it manually every time. No error handling or logic there 😉

Then, because of a colleague, I created more advanced .cmd files and started using little Foreach-loops and checking/error handling. Scheduled many of these .cmds for logging and reporting purposes or server deployments. (I made a lot of unattended Windows 2000/2003 deployments back then)

And then… The first versions of PowerShell came around the end of 2005. I started using Monad for a bit and was sold on the easy way of doing things. I started using 1.0 a bit more and 2.0 at the end of 2009. This was the early days of PowerShell, and I wanted to learn more about that. Some colleagues were in their VBScript period then, and I didn’t like the ‘write 100 lines of code for one thing and realized very quickly that PowerShell was better.

First scripts

Well… My first scripts weren’t that pretty, with almost no error handling, and sometimes I needed external programs to give me the data I needed. PowerShell was in its early days, and few modules were available back then. But I used it for many things in multiple jobs, parsing logfiles and emailing alerts from that or creating Active Directory accounts and Exchange mailboxes, etc. People did start calling me “PowerShell Harm” or saying that my motto was “A day without PowerShell is a day wasted” 😀

PowerShell as the standard for scripting

When PowerShell 5.0 was there, it turned into my primary tool. No more .cmd files (only when needed and often just to run a .ps1 file from it). More modules were available, and every Windows Server version or Role/Feature incorporated PowerShell for managing it. Most admins know PowerShell because of the Exchange Management Shell, and they didn’t like it that much and were hesitant to use it.

Teaching others to use PowerShell

It started with PowerShell 2.0, but with every new version, I made colleagues and customers more aware and enthusiastic about it. Showing them the possibilities and how things work is always something that I enjoy. Changing struggling admins to happy admins 🙂 Did a PowerShell workshop at work a few months ago for my colleagues from NEXXT, and even though I didn’t prepare very well for that evening, they were enthusiastic about it and asked me to do another!

Microsoft Tech Community for PowerShell/Endpoint Manager

In November 2021, I started answering questions on the Tech Community forum for PowerShell (Link), but also in the Endpoint Manager one. (Link)I like helping people and learning things from them. I answered a lot of things and was a member of the week for PowerShell 🙂 I highly recommend anyone use the forum to help people, drop their questions, or read the topics or blogs.

Powershellisfun.com

In March 2022, I started thinking about starting my WordPress blog post site. I knew it had to have something to do with PowerShell 😉 Claimed a domain name, powershellisfun.com, because it’s fun, and started writing. My first few posts didn’t receive that much attention, but others did 🙂

My stats for 2022 so far:

GitHub

I use it for all my scripts, but I only have a private repository that I use in Visual Studio Code. And then I thought… Why don’t I share all the scripts I write about on the site using GitHub? And so I did. People follow (Star/Watch) it and even fork it 🙂

I also receive pull requests with nice fixes in it too! Thanks again ScrambledBrain, for the updates on the update-modules function!

To be continued…

And that’s all for now, just a post with a little bit more detail about me and how I got here… See you in the next blog post 🙂