It's been quite a year for me and that roll just doesn't seem to want to stop!
Long time followers of this blog will probably remember an article I wrote in May about my experience attending PS-Summit-2018 . In that article I described all the great topics I saw, the people I met, the state of the community and generally how blown away I was from that conference. If you asked me at that time if I could present a topic at the Summit, I would have said you were crazy!
Well, here we are in mid-October and I just found out two days ago that one of the two topics I submitted was accepted. That means I am heading to Seattle in April to present my discussion on automating Active Directory health checks!!! I am super jazzed for this opportunity and a little nervous at the same time. I would like to put on a kick ass presentation without embarrassing myself.
You may also recall that this is the exact topic I wrote about in the PS Conference Book earlier this year: PS-Conference-Book . The chapter in the book is 22 pages and details 9 scripts I created to automatically check different parts of Active Directory and only alert me when there is a problem. I walk the reader through creating the scripts, setting up scheduled jobs to run the scripts as well as giving tips and insight on all things Active Directory. My chapter is one of 30 and the entire book is packed wall-to-wall with great content! You really should consider buying this book!
I put my heart and soul into that chapter and I couldn't just re-hash the same exact content for a 45 minute presentation at the Summit. Even though I think the chapter is great, it was written as a how to guide to get from 0 to 100 quickly. But I think that it works perfectly as a book format. My concern is that the material needs something extra to be turned into an interesting talk topic. I've already started adding some interesting new content to this talk showing how you can take my code and use it as a framework to build any set of tests you like and then taking the results and sending them to different types of mediums (i.e. email, chatops, MS teams, etc).
I definitely have some work ahead to get ready for this awesome event and the opportunity presented to me. If you are heading to Summit in April, take a moment to say Hi! My session will be on May 1st at 4:15 pm. If you have never attended, I totally recommend you making the trip. It's probably the best event for the PowerShell community all year in my opinion and the organizers do an absolutely amazing job producing this event.
If you go, one thing you quickly realize is there is more content than you can physically attend and so much of the content is awesome. You end up having to pick and choose what you want to see live and then catch up on the missed sessions when the recordings come out later in the month. For me, I already am bummed out because I am presenting at the same time as Kevin Marquette and he'll be doing a talk on PSGraph. I would attend his talk in a heartbeat if I wasn't presenting at the exact same time!!! Kevin is awesome and while I really want a packed room for my talk, I would completely understand if you skipped my session to see Kevin in person. He's an outstanding speaker and just a super great dude with an absolute ton of knowledge.
The summit info is already online and tickets will be on sale shortly. They always sell out, so if you want to attend, start working on your pitch to your manager NOW! The best place for information about the Summit conference is at Powershell.org . If you want to know more, visit that link or feel free to ask me questions.
Stay tuned for more great news about Summit!