My PowerShell Summit Experience – Part 3: Start of Sessions

On Tuesday, the breakout sessions and deep dives really start. I started the day by having the grand idea of getting up and going to the gym to workout. This is one of those things that sounds like a great idea, but sometimes you realize was a horrible idea. In my case, it was good. I needed exercise, and it helped me regain some energy that was necessary to prepare my brain for learning.

I headed over to Summit for another delicious breakfast, as I blasted croissants, french toast, fruit among other stuff. Oh and coffee. I always make it a point to load up on caffeine throughout the day and deal with the eventual crash into hell later after I am done listening.

The first session I attended was on regular expressions with Mark Minasi. I have to say, I don’t think there is a better speaker than Mark that I have seen in tech. He is incredibly interactive and friendly. He made a point to go around the room before he started and get to know people and what they wanted to get out of the session. That is pretty effing boss in my opinion. The session itself was an excellent introduction into how to think about the regex engine and I found it made it significantly easier to understand. I will definitely be learning some more.

My next session was learning some OpenSSH internals with Anthony Nocentino. I have actually talked to Anthony a few times on Twitter, and made it a point to meet and chat with him before the session. Anthony is a Linux guy (but PowerShell too) and is probably the best resource I know for Linux. He is a really down to earth guy and friendly. The session was really awesome as it gave some of the concepts of what is happening in OpenSSH and how it is used in Windows and Linux.

I had an interesting lunch as I sat down and then was surrounded by a lot of really smart people. Marc Kellermen, LazyWinAdmin (Francois-Xavier Cat), Joel Bennett and Max Trinidad were among them. A lot of fun listening to some of the conversations going around.

The final part of the day were the lightning community demos, which was really interesting. There was a ton of really interesting stuff that people presented ranging from talking about .Net interfaces to reporting on CIFS shares. I really admire the presenters because taking your laptop, plugging it in and presenting a demo (in front of all your peers and Jeffrey Snover) can be pretty nerve-racking.