My PowerShell Summit Experience – Part 2: I MET SNOVER

My morning started early (4 AM) as my brain and body was still operating on EST. During my morning, I decided to write my first blog post on Summit. After this and quick Facetime chat with my wife and daughter, I was off to breakfast and pick up my badge.

Rob Reynolds of Chocolatey and I have been online friends for a few years since I am a heavy Chocolatey user and advocate, so we made a point to meet up for breakfast. I had the pleasure of having breakfast with Rob, Gary Ewan Park, Glenn Sarti and Ethan Brown (both Windows guys on Puppet).

Next, was the keynote from Don Jones who is always an entertaining character to listen to. During his talk, Don gave out several community awards to guys like Adam Bertram, Warren Frame, Jason Helmick and even Jeffrey Snover. Jeffrey Snover was actually the next person to speak as he went over where PowerShell and some of his predictions for the future. During these talks I was lucky enough to be placed into a delicious Puppet/Chocolatey sandwich. Meaning, I was between Michael Lombardi and Gary Ewan Park.

I will not go into detail about the other presentations, as I am sure others will cover them well. One of the main reasons I wanted to attend Summit was to meet other people in the community that I admire or I have interacted with at some point. So here is a short list:

• Jeff Hicks – I met Jeff outside briefly and thanked him for giving me an introduction to a client I write for.
• IISReset – I found Mathias outside in the hall working on a lightning demo he will be presenting. Very cool guy.
• Jason Helmick – I had a class with Jason a year ago on DSC, so it was nice to see him again.
• Darwin Sanoy – Darwin is a huge Chocolatey maintainer of packages and is an expert in a lot of areas it seems. We talked a bit about his presentation.
• Matt Wrock – Matt works at Chef and has done some awesome work on Boxstarter and Packer. Very cool guy.
• Missy Januszko – Missy wrote the DSC Book (highly recommend). When I met her she was dressed up as PowerShell hero.
• Josh Duffney – Josh has some great Pluralsight stuff online and is doing some awesome things in the community.
• Jeffrey Snover – So as I was outside wandering around before attending the cocktail party, I happened to see Jeffrey speaking to someone and then went to the bathroom. I thought to myself “Welp, this is my chance”. I proceeded to stalk him outside of the bathroom and when he came out, I was able to introduce myself and have a short chat. He was really nice and candid.

There are definitely others I met that at the moment I can’t recall (probably due to my brain still on EST).

The cocktail party was a real blast as I wandered around and found people to talk to. Keep in mind I am pretty damn introverted, so it did take a beer or two for this to be comfortable to me. I was super stoked when people actually knew who I was from the content I have written over the last year. I had several people come up and say “Hey its Dan the Builder!”. Awesome to meet other like-minded folks!