The PSSaturday event in Karlsruhe took place on November 30th, 2024; in this blog post, I will share some highlights of the event, including my session :).
- What is PSSaturday?
- Sponsors
- Travel and Speaker Dinner
- Sessions
- The schedule
- Creating a PowerShell executor – a non-dev’s tale – Evgenij Smirnov
- PSAwtrix3 – PowerShell goes Matrix – Frank Lindenblatt
- Make every day Christmas! – Björn Sudling
- Typical IT lunch 😉
- PowerShell Journey – From an IT admin to blogger and MVP – Harm Veenstra
- ChocOps Packages – James Ruskin
- Argument completers for the untrusting admin – Ben Reader
- Closing of the day
- Wrapping up
What is PSSaturday?
“Join us for our first-ever ‘PowerShellSaturday Karlsruhe’ on November 30th, 2024, in Ettlingen near Karlsruhe, as ScriptRunner welcomes us in their offices!
Christian Ritter (founder of # PSUGFFM) and Emrys MacInally (co-organizer of # PSUGFFM) organized this full day of PowerShell, DevOps, and automation.
Please note: This event is in-person, and no remote option will be available this year!
Experience a full day of PowerShell-focused content with 12 incredible sessions featuring international and local speakers across two tracks. Take part in the Code-Golf Challenge, enjoy complimentary beverages and lunch, and connect with community rockstars, Microsoft MVPs, and fellow PowerShell enthusiasts.
The event falls right before Christmas, and we aim to kick off the festive season with a day full of technical excitement and holiday cheer. Secure your seat and celebrate the season’s spirit with us!”
Source: https://psugffm.odoo.com/pssaturday
Sponsors
Before I continue, a big shout-out to the sponsors! ScriptRunner, Medavis, and Octopus deploy! Without them, this wouldn’t be possible!
Travel and Speaker Dinner
I traveled from my hometown, Steenwijk, to Ettlingen, near Karlsruhe, where my hotel was. The ScriptRunner office (Where the PSSaturday event is hosted) is located in Ettlingen, and the hotel is a five-minute walk from there, which is excellent!
After checking in, having a few beers, and meeting all the speakers and some event participants, we went to the city center and had dinner there. It was great fun 🙂 I had a good meal, returned to the hotel, had a few drinks, and crawled into bed…
The next day, after breakfast at 07:15, we went to the ScriptRunner office and received our Speaker T-shirts. 🙂 After the official opening of the event, the sessions started…
Sessions
The schedule
This was the schedule, and there were changes because two speakers couldn’t make it.
Creating a PowerShell executor – a non-dev’s tale – Evgenij Smirnov
The first session of the day for me was the session from Evgenij about packaging PowerShell scripts as an application or how you could let it run as a service or daemon on Windows or Linux.
He highlighted how to execute PowerShell from the System.Management.Automation namespace, and showed how the PowerShell SDK works with an example project in Visual Studio. This is not something that I have done before and looks attractive to play around with 🙂 (I’m a scripter, not a programmer, of course 😉 )
PSAwtrix3 – PowerShell goes Matrix – Frank Lindenblatt
The second session was from Frank about using PowerShell to manage the Pixel Smart Clock.
It’s nice to see what you can do to control the intelligent clocks, and Frank showed examples in the live demo using the PSAwtrix3 module, the built-in apps, and custom apps.
Thinking about ordering one now 🙂 I saw the other people in the session ordering one or even two!
Make every day Christmas! – Björn Sudling
The last session of the morning was from Björn and was Christmas-themed. However, he hates it 🙂
He highlighted using Git, branch strategies, reviewing, and protection rules. To demonstrate the flow in Git, he used an excellent Christmas icon Function. He went through the steps and showed how to prevent leaking security items. How you should use Script Analyzer, bug reports, and link them. It was an excellent interactive session, with helpful tips and tricks, including publishing module and using feed, while not taking himself too seriously 😉
Typical IT lunch 😉
We had pizza for lunch in many flavors, and people were hungry after consuming all the knowledge!
During lunch and after the last sessions, we played a lot of table-top football!
PowerShell Journey – From an IT admin to blogger and MVP – Harm Veenstra
And then… My session 🙂 In my first session, I did a meta session about the journey towards becoming an MVP. Fun to make and give, but… I was done in 27 minutes and had 45 minutes in total, so there was room for questions 😉 People laughed during the session, I didn’t take myself too seriously, and I did okay even though I was somewhat nervous 🙂 And don’t forget to check my other website, https://powerpointisfun.com! (I like PowerPoint so much that I created a new blog website for it)
My review results (averaged from 8 reviewers; I think that there were around 16 people?) from the people who attended were:
Overall rating: 4.6/5
Topic quality: 4.3/5
Content delivery: 4.8/5
Speaker delivery: 4.9/5
Feedback:
– Good start!
– It was a very inspiring session that gave me the courage to keep trying to submit and give talks.
– Great slides; the talk was less meta than I would have liked. I would include more practical tips to achieve the goals
Below are the posts on social media about my session:
ChocOps Packages – James Ruskin
No, not DevOps, but ChocOps 🙂
It was a nice story related to the well-known books The Phoenix Project and its successor, The Unicorn Project, and James used many analogies. But also an overview of best practices and some demos 🙂 Afterward, there were enough questions and jokes 😀 #Sorry
Argument completers for the untrusting admin – Ben Reader
This was the last session that I attended; Ben did a solid session on argument completers and why you should use them.
The agenda for the session was:
Ben talked us through the different problem scenarios and demonstrated solutions for them. He then improved the scripts and added validation of values requiring case sensitivity, etc. Nice techniques and discussions. I will be looking into using this, too!
Closing of the day
And then, it was a wrap 🙂 PSSaturday was a success!
The organizers (From left to right): Emrys MacInally, Christian Ritter, and Heiko Brenn.
Wrapping up
That was my first event as a speaker, and I was pleased with everything I learned in preparation for it. I have gained more confidence after doing it. I also enjoyed meeting all the speakers and participants and conversing with everyone. (Dinner in Ettlingen with everyone near the Christmas market was great, too!) Sharing knowledge is always good! The PowerShell Community rocks!
Wow – looks like a lot of fun. I guess it’s assumed everyone speaks English, huh?
It sure was and yes, English is the language (People from the Netherlands, Germany, France, Sweden, etc.)
It’s good to read you had a lot of fun during your first presentation as a speaker! This event seemed to be a successful one for you and the others! I hope you will share even more in the upcoming feature, and I really appreciate you sharing your knowledge with the community.
Thank you, and yes… I certainly had fun which is always a good thing 😊 Sharing is caring!