I can run, but I can’t hide…

When I started my first real job in IT (almost 15 years ago) it felt a bit odd. At that time I was spending most of my time on Linux, yet my work required mainly Windows skills. My work colleague knew my background so I got task that supposed to be “gateway drug” to get me back on Windows side: updating backup script that was written in batch. Pure batch: I was not allowed  to install any of the *nix tool’s ports to aid me in this project. And there were few significant requirements, and new one arrived every now and than.

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OMI: revisited

Initial plan was different, but it looks like next Tuesday (well, more like Wednesday in my time zone…) I’m going to present about OMI for the third time. This time I will present for Omaha PowerShell User Group. You can find meeting details (and sign up) here. I must say I’m super-excited. This group is relatively “fresh” (this will be their 2nd meeting). It’s lead by Jacob Benson and Boe Prox. And Boe is a person that I “know” for years. We never met in person, but he was one of few people I virtually known in my early PowerShell community days. That plus the fact that I learned a ton from his blog. No surprises, blog title says it all, right?

SQL filtering.

When you hold a hammer you may end up seeing nails everywhere. I won’t pretend that I don’t have this problem. PowerShell is my hammer and “I see nails”. For example: when I have to work with a product that doesn’t allow me to perform some system-wide searches but allows me to export entire configuration to XML document I will improve my XPath skills and use my hammer for this nail. My XPath series is side effect of that.

I have more ‘nails’ around me though. Like ticketing system (lets keep it nameless) that has (for my needs) very poor search mechanism, but has SQL backend. I could probably use API that this product has (I think? Frankly, I didn’t even try to find it…) but writing something SQL-aware seemed more natural and reusable. After all – I may use the same ‘skeleton’ for anything else that has SQL backend.

PowerShell Magazine

Last week I managed to write few short posts for PowerShell Magazine. It was whole series about XPath. You can think of it as an extension to my earlier post about case-insensitive Select-Xml. And I can’t express enough how different (read: better) this experience was from writing anything for my own blog. Having second pair of eyes (with healthy amount of criticism) made huge difference in the final “product”.