The Surly Admin

SpiceWorld 2013

Really excited that I’ll be attending Spiceworld 2013 this year.  I’ve been using Spiceworks software since 2009 and been very active in their community most of that time but this is the first time I’ve attended their yearly conference.  I think it will be a great way to meet a lot of the people I’ve been interacting with for years but couldn’t tell you what they look like to save my life!

I’m also excited to be working with another Spicehead, Rob Dunn, on the Introduction to PowerShell 3.0 breakout session.  Rob and I are working hard to present PowerShell to beginners and hopefully cut down some of that initial learning curve that no doubt exists for newbies.  We really wanted to give a hands-on experience to learning PowerShell too, so no endless list of slide’s and lecture.  Our plan is to present 2, 3 maybe 4 slides than just sit in front of a PC and write a script with the whole group.  We’ll have to guide the script a bit as we only have an hour, but the idea is to present 3 different script ideas and let the group decide which script we’ll write.  From there we’ll show you how you can use PowerShell itself to help you write the script–bouncing from the shell to the ISE and back again until we have a rough little script written.

I’ve never done anything like this, and I’m thankful that Rob will be with me.  Rob has been with Spiceworks even longer than I have and written some great scripts.  His expertise is mostly with vbScript, which I think is really nice as he can bring that perspective to the PowerShell experience.  I’ve written quite a lot in vbScript too so it’s nice that we can speak the “short-hand”, without translating back and forth between languages!   It’s also been exciting that we both seem to have the same ideas–so far!–on what and how we want to do this so we can really focus on trying to bring the best and most interesting session we can.  Nothing worse than sitting there and having some guy sit behind a desk and drone on, essentially reading his slide deck to you!  This will NOT be that.  We’re going to be sitting with a PC on the screen writing the script with you.  Explaining why we do things the way we do them, and running into the same problems you would run into while writing a script and solving the problems right there.

So come down to Austin and join us at Spiceworld, find out what’s really happening in the world of the SMB and maybe learn a little PowerShell along the way.

October 14, 2013 - Posted by Martin9700 | General, PowerShell | Introduction to PowerShell, spiceworks, Spiceworld