Intro

Why did I register psadmin.dev and what is this blog doing here?

Hi, allow me to introduce myself. I am Mark. I’m an admin/engineer/operator (if you’re oldschool) for Windows desktops, and sometimes servers. It was circa 2011 and I was toiling away at the help desk, answering calls and knocking out low hanging fruit in the user admin space. Reset passwords, check and update group memberships, and sometimes provision new employee accounts.

An engineer with considerably more experience in the space than me, a young hotshot-type that seemed to have all the answers, all the confidence, and a marked disdain for mouse clicks, recommended that I learn PowerShell before anything else to advance my career. He recommended the excellent Learn Windows PowerShell in a Month of Lunches, which was at that time updated for PowerShell v3. Those lunch hours were hard at first, but the great thing about learning PowerShell is any Windows OS provides the tools to tinker around with.

It was about two thirds of the way in that I began to have great difficulty finishing the lessons. Up until then I had dutifully read the chapters over the course of my lunch, repeated the exercises, and attempted the chatper-end challenges. The problem I kept encountering was that instead of doing the examples or digging into that chapter’s subject matter, I would get sidetracked working on problems to help me get my work done faster. The book had done its job well enough that I was so busy using what I had already learned and exploring interesting real world problems that I never finished the book.

And that is where I would like my coworkers and any aspiring IT types to arrive: on a quest for PowerShell mastery fueled by current productivity and the desire to build out a toolset.

Function Learn-PowerShell ($Examples,$Insight) {
	$Results = $Examples + $Insight
	Write-Output $Results
}