Don Jones

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Don Jones

372 articles published

3 min read

PowerShell Summit Europe Registration

Registration for PowerShell Summit Europe will commence on February 27th, 2015 at roughly 12:01am server time (I believe the server is in a Pacific time Azure datacenter). We will be limited to roughly 100 attendees. I want everyone to understand the basic rules of engagement for this. Setting up and running this event involves significant financial risk. While in this case the event venue, a Microsoft office in Kista (near Stockholm), Sweden, isn’t charging us huge fees and requiring us to commit to hotel rooms and the like, there is still risk.

3 min read

Design the Next Scripting Games

We have some folks working on the next Scripting Games… but we want some feedback from the community to make sure we’re offering something of value. The current plan is to run a series of events, with both Beginner and Intermediate tracks. There will be no “advanced” track; the feeling is that, if you’re advanced, you should be helping out by judging ;). Events will be constructed as a combination of puzzles and real-world tasks, meaning some things will simply test your PowerShell skills, while others will test them in a more production-applicable way.

1 min read

PowerShell.org Free eBook Transition

Over the past few weeks, Matt Penny has been busy moving our free eBooks into their new home on Penflip. Code, when available, is located in our GitHub repo, and modules will soon be available in the PowerShell Gallery for downloading via Install-Module. Penflip is a Markdown-based editing system backed by GitHub. This means anyone can contribute corrections, additional material, and so on - which will make it easier to maintain these great books over time.

2 min read

Our eBook Transition – and Your Chance to Contribute!

We’re in the process of migrating our free ebook collection over to Penflip, an online, Git-based collaborative authoring and publishing tool. Matt Penny has taken the lead in converting our Word documents to the Markdown syntax used by Penflip, and as you can see on our ebooks page, most of the titles now have an initial version in Penflip. One neat thing about Penflip is that anyone can register for a free account, fork one of our projects, and make their own modifications.

3 min read

Let's Make a PowerShell Job Interview Quiz. C'mon and Help.

The folks at Smarterer have agreed to let us - that’s all of us, as in “The PowerShell Community” - build a sort of “exam” for people to prove their PowerShell Proficiency. And I need your help to do it! Step 1, you need to be pretty decent with PowerShell yourself. Not Level 12 Guru Level, mind you, but you should be working with it daily. Most of this book should make sense to you.

1 min read

eBook Cover Contest

Fancy yourself a graphics person? Just like to doodle? We’re holding a contest to create new covers for our various ebooks. Winners will receive absolutely nothing, other than a cover credit within the text (hey, we’ll also give you a full set of the ebooks for free, what the heck). Covers must include the book title, and should include the PowerShell.org logo. The logo is below. Don’t include author names in the artwork.

3 min read

PowerShell Summit N.A. 2015 Status Update & Info

As of this post, PowerShell Summit North America 2015 is full, and registration has been cut off. We’re taking some time to confirm our numbers and venue capacity; if we’re able to open additional seats, that will happen in January 2015. We will allow any additional capacity to be registered until one month prior to the Summit, or until it sells out, whichever comes first. We do not maintain a waiting list; please check here and on the @PSHSummit Twitter feed for any announcements.

2 min read

JOB POSTING: Help us Run PowerShell.org

[UPDATE: We’ve gotten an outpouring of responses - I’m literally a bit teary-eyed right now - so I’ll work with the existing set of volunteers and post again should everyone realize what we’re asking and go running for the hills!] We’re looking for a volunteer to take over regular maintenance of the PowerShell.org website. We may even have a small budget to make this a paid-contractor gig. Trick being, it’s gotta be done _regularly.

1 min read

A Crowdsourced PowerShell Proficiency Exam

I wanted to call your attention to Smarterer, a company recently acquired by my employer, Pluralsight. Smarterer’s schtick (apart from vexing my auto-correct) is that the host crowdsourced technology assessments. In other words, the community decides what questions to ask someone in the test. The magic is that their back-end engine, over time, figures out which questions are awesome and which ones suck, and adjusts the assessment accordingly. So as more people (especially qualified ones) take the test, the better it gets at identifying skilled people.

3 min read

Our NaNoWriMo Challenge: Write a PowerShell Article

In honor of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), I wanted to offer a smaller, and more unique, challenge. Send me a PowerShell article. Seriously. My name is Don Jones, and this is PowerShell.org, so you can probably figure out how to contact me. Send me an article between 800 and 3,000 words (including code) in Microsoft Word format. Don’t attach any scripts. Please keep the formatting super-simple: paste code from the PowerShell ISE, and use Word’s default styles otherwise.