A Starting Place

Sometimes we just need a place to express our ideas. There’s no better place than a fresh new blog. I’ve never really blogged in the past. You see, my passion for scripting has finally hit a point where I feel like I need to contribute more to the community. Let’s get caught up on the last 15 years of my career.

I was interested in programming when I was 15. I’ll date myself and tell you that the year was 2001. (That makes me 32 at the time of this writing) I managed to infect my father’s computer with the Sub7 Trojan. I provided hours of panic as his Antivirus started screaming at him, along with the several spooky messages I left on his computer. I distinctly remember chatting with his girlfriend as I was remotely opening and closing the CD-ROM. This was the catalyst for my obsession with learning how to write executables.

I joined the US Army in 2004 as a 74B (Information Services Specialist) where I later converted to a 25B (Same Title). Several years later and a moderate battle with Leukemia, I finally became a Warrant Officer. I am a 255A for those who are curious.

I learned to write in many different programming languages throughout the years. The Army certainly allowed me plenty of opportunity to write programs, software, and deploy several hundred scripts that I wrote. I started with VBScript and transitioned to VB.NET and C#. I started learning HTML before I started college. I built several iPhone and iPad apps along with a few educational games for my lovely wife. I was still a very young programmer and scripter. I didn’t really start exploring PowerShell until 2011.

Being a Server Administrator in the Army is like being a postman… We’re overworked and underappreciated. Nobody ever really see’s what we do but you know we’ve been doing something. Everyone thinks we’re all the same and lack personalities. But, what happens when your regular postman takes a day off work? You get someone else’s mail and that package you were looking for is gone. The bottom line is that there are good server admins and bad server admins.. just like we have good postmen and ones that don’t deliver letters to Santa Clause.

I set out to become a great server admin. I dedicated a lot of personal and professional time to learning how each major service works on both Windows and Linux servers. I earned an Associates and Bachelors degree in Computer Science and learned to apply my programming skills within my profession. I developed more than just scripts that you could run every now and then. I developed entire toolkits that can be given to hundreds of people to automate their daily tasks, even automate the maintenance on their environments. I learned how to make my scripts work for me so I could focus on new projects.

Although this blog is aimed at Server Administrators, I plan on adding content that can be used for anyone using PowerShell. Sorry for the lengthy intro… I promise that the other posts will be much more informative! Make sure to leave a comment if you have any questions about any of the posts!