PowerShell Summit 2019 – The Sequel

This week I returned to PowerShell Summit in Bellevue for the second straight year, and as a speaker nonetheless! Last year was my first year at Summit, and it was so amazing I immediately planned on returning so I was very happy to be reunited with my industry buddies.

Presenting

I have been active in the PowerShell community for about two years now, mostly in the area of writing blogs/articles and creating community scripts and modules. When I left Summit last year, I remember talking to my wife and saying how great my experience was. At that time she mentioned perhaps I should speak next time I come, which I thought at the time was not something I was ready to do. Well, a lot changes in a years time I suppose.

When the call for speakers came out for Summit 2019 I was happy to propose a few sessions, and my talk on automating with Chocolatey was accepted. My initial plan was to take my talk from Chocolateyfest, change it a bit and add some demos. About two weeks before arriving at Summit I realized that the script I was using for Chocolatey internalizing was absolute garbage, so I decided to make it more “publicly consumable” by making it into a proper PowerShell module which is not on Github and PowerShell Gallery.

All this coding left me little time for actually preparing for my presentation, and unfortunately the demo Gods were angry with this as my demo videos were a semi disaster during my presentation (sorry folks). At any rate, I am hopeful the content I presented was valuable to my attendees!

The hallway sessions

There is a running joke by many that the most important sessions at Summit are the done in the hallway. As much as I love the technical sessions, I have to admit there is truth to this. There are SO MANY superstars in the field at Summit. People from Microsoft, Chef, Puppet, AWS, Ansible, Facebook among others. Everywhere you turn there is someone who is doing something extraordinary. I have been very fortunate to be able to meet some of these people, such as Steven Murawski, Ashley McGlone, Joey Aiello, Mike Robbins and Matt Wrock.

There are also a lot of folks in the community that I have been fortunate enough to become friendly with throughout the last year, and being able to reunite is so much fun. It’s what makes returning to Summit really special for me to be honest, having the comfort of knowing a good amount of people here. Take it from me, you do not have to be some superstar with 5,000 Twitter followers to fit in here. We are all just people who love PowerShell, coming to talk shop, learn and enjoy each other’s company.

Closing

Apparently about half to three-quarters of the attendees were first time “Summiteers”. This is absolutely fantastic as it indicates our community is thriving. I will be honest, I likely will not be returning next year due to the fact that I have two young children and a wife who has been awesome enough to let me get away for a week two years in a row, so it probably isn’t fair to ask her to be a single parent three years in a row. I will be back though in the future (I would love to attend PSConfEU so that may be my next trip), as this conference now has a very special place in my heart.