Midwest Management Summit 2018 - Day 2

Day two is complete and a lot of more great things.  In case you missed it, I'm at the Midwest Management Summit at the Mall of America (MMSMOA) - you can read more about day #1 here.

Ten Things You Need as an Enterprise Scripter

Speakers: Fred Bainbridge and Ryan Ephgrave

Two great speakers on all things PowerShell in an enterprise environment.  I'm going to have a lot to go back and work on.

What I'm excited about:

• Checking out Pester, which Steve Parankewich has been trying to get me to check out for some time now.
• Checking out the PS Script Analyzer to find out how bad my code really is.
• Finally jumping on the GIT bandwagon.  I use this for personal and side projects, but it may be time to bring its use into the enterprise.

ConfigMgr Configuration Items With PowerShell to Detect/Report/Remediate

Speakers: Jeff Bolduan and Sherry Kissinger

This was one of my top picks for this week because I've been working at a lot at using Configuration Manager to go out to find and fix problems.  On top of the technology, I was excited to see Sherry present after seeing her pop up day after day on the Microsoft forums.  Seriously, who hasn't been helped by something she's posted?  As of this writing Sherry has more than 4,500 replies on the forums with almost 700 posts marked helpful.

What I'm excited about:

• Using Configuration Items to Disable Auto Updates (Chrome, Firefox, etc) and leaving my packages cleaner.
• Possibly seeing about using CI's and a toast to replace my current workstation reboot process.
• Checking out Sherry's Status Message Script.

There were some great comments from the audience on this one about how they use Configuration Items, and it seemed like many of them would be applicable to most environments.  I asked if anyone was sharing them online in some central place and it doesn't appear that anyone is.  As she did with most questions that had no answers, she put the challenge out there that if it doesn't exist, then perhaps someone needs to make one available to the community.  I have some ideas, and I may have stayed up a bit and put some effort into a new project.  Look for something soon on that from me, probably announced over twitter.

Wait, I wrote that?

Speakers: Fred Bainbridge and Ryan Ephgrave

I switched to this session after going to Fred & Ryan's morning session and enjoying how they interacted.  The duo showed off some bad code and had demos with measurements to back it up.  I think there is a lot I can improve upon.  I think I'll start with avoiding the pipe as nearly all costs, and trying to be better about adding in-function help when I write new code.

What I'm excited about:

• Making my code perform better with the tips they provided, such as avoiding the pipe (and what to replace it with).
• Finally digging into VSCode - it's been on my list for a while but after seeing how well it worked in the demos, I can't wait to jump on board.
• Writing better code overall - learning to measure the way I do things and looking for better solutions.