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. _Most of that risk is not borne by PowerShell.org, _but for the most part by myself, personally. Our speakers also commit to covering their own travel expenses (something we’re hoping to offset this year). In addition, PowerShell team members are taking time away from the product to attend, which is a huge logistical commitment because it’s such a relatively small team.
For the Europe 2014 event, we had very poor registration numbers almost until the last minute. We also had to work very hard to drum up topic submissions from European speakers. Those two facts worry us a lot, because it suggests that there isn’t a strong and engaged community interested in this event. If that’s the case, we don’t want to barge in and run the event at all. As a result, we’re going to be taking a pretty risk-averse approach this time, and I wanted to be up-front and forthright about it.
So: We’re going to evaluate the registration numbers and velocity in mid-April. By then, we need to see at least 20-30 registrations. (We usually achieve that in the first week of registrations for the North American event.) If we’re not hitting that level, then the event is subject to cancellation (and everyone will naturally get a full and complete refund).
Also know that, should we make it past that point, registration will end by August 15th 2015 or when we fill the available space, whichever comes first. In other words, last-minute registration won’t be a thing.
The success of this event **depends on the European members of the overall PowerShell community. ** You need to help get the word out. We aren’t going to be advertising, soliciting Microsoft’s help, or other techniques. This isn’t a commercial conference; it’s being done by the community and for the community - and if the community can’t make it happen, then it won’t happen.
Our agenda will be going online shortly, and you should head to http://PowerShellSummit.org to find the registration links (after reading the introductory material, click “Europe 2015” for details). We’ll get it all posted and ready for February 27th - it won’t be live until then. **Help us get the word out. **Tell co-workers. Use Twitter, Google+, and Facebook. Attend user group meetings and spread the word. We’ve got about 6 weeks to get 20-30 people signed up to make sure we’re covering base expenses and making this happen.

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.
What we need from the community is some sense of what you want to get from the Games. However, before you reply, understand what is NOT on the table: we will not be running an event where every entry gets personal commentary or feedback from an expert judge. It simply isn’t practical - everyone doing the judging has a full-time job, and offering personal feedback just isn’t feasible.
What COULD be on the table is offering a numeric score from a judge, based on the completeness of your entry and what the judge thinks of it. However, if it’s a low score, you’re not going to be told why (“no commentary,” see above). So we’re not sure that numeric scores are useful.
One proposal has been to post the events, and have judges select both good ones and less-good ones to write about. In other words, provide commentary on the outstanding entries, but not EVERY entry. Individual entries wouldn’t receive a score, but you could certainly compare what you did to the outstanding ones that did receive commentary. The idea here is to give you a task on which to test your skills, and to provide some educational feedback on some representative entries. The fact is that, in any given task, we tend to see a lot of similar-looking entries anyway, so hopefully taking some of them and commenting (both positively and constructively) will help everyone “judge” their own entries and improve their skills.
After trying numerous approaches to the Games over the past years, and after listening closely to people’s feedback, we’re trying to come up with something that is both useful and do-able.
What do you think of that proposal? Or, would you offer another proposal for us to build the Games around? Keep in mind - any proposal that suggests “expert commentary on every entry” will simply have to be turned down outright. After major discussion, we simply can’t commit to it. We’ll leave this open for the month of February 2015 - discuss away!
Add to the discussion in the Forums. Login required; not accepting comments on this post.

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. You can download ebooks directly from Penflip in a variety of e-book formats. We’re now focused on electronic formats, rather than traditional page-based layout, although PDF is still an available download option if you want to make a hardcopy.
The conversion from Word to Markdown was challenging and largely manual, so if you run across formatting problems (especially with code), we absolutely appreciate your help in fixing those. Simply “branch” the book, creating your own copy of the project. Make corrections, and then submit those back to the master branch. Approvals are manual, so give us a few days to review what you’ve done and merge it into the master.
Massive thanks to Matt for all the long hours making this conversion happen, and to the folks who’ve submitted cover art for the new books.

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. You can then submit your changes back to the master branch, so we can incorporate your changes into the ebook. This will make it easy for everyone in the community to suggest new content, offer corrections, and so on. I encourage you to help out - right now, you may simply notice some flaws from the semi-automated and fully hellish Markdown conversion, and we’d love your assistance in correcting those.
Penflip also supports on-demand downloads of each ebook in a variety of common formats, including EPUB, PDF, and more. That means you’ll always be able to grab the latest version of your favorite ebook. We’ve not yet migrated the source code that goes with some of the ebooks; the plan is to move those into our GitHub repo over the next week.
Penflip will be enabling the next generation of our ebooks, including a massive new DSC title I plan to begin working on in 2015.
Thanks for any help you can provide, and I hope you continue to find the ebooks helpful!

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.
Step 2, you need to download my Quiz Question Writing Guide (It’s all of 1 page) and Topic List. PowerShell Quiz Guidelines is the download. Go on, I’ll wait.
**Step 3, **you need to sign up, using your e-mail address, and let me know you’re interested in helping. What you’re volunteering to do is, over the course of February 2015, write at least 20 questions. That’s about 2 questions per category. You’re also agreeing to help peer-review the questions other folks write, so we can spot the stinkers.  Signups are due by January 20th 2015 .

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. Authors are credit on the book’s “About” page.
• Images must be 8.5" wide by 11" high, preferably at 300dpi, in PNG or JPG format (see these specifications if you need that sizing in pixels).
• Don’t include art, photos, or any other elements that you yanked off the Internet, including Microsoft imagery, unless you can provide us with written permission from the copyright holder to use it.

You can submit a series for all the books, or just covers for the book or books you like best.
Be serious. Have fun. Whatever! Send submissions via e-mail to Admin, right here at PowerShell.org. We’ll let you submit until the **end of January 2015, **and we’ll pick the best selections we have at the time.

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.
For those already registered, we _do not have any official hotel recommendations. _You’re welcome to use the Summit Forum to see where others are staying, or to arrange for carpooling or other stuff. We certainly encourage all attendees to check the Forum for Q&A and other discussion - it’s never too early to start getting involved. On the hotel front, just look for hotels in downtown Charlotte, or near Microsoft Charlotte, based on your preferences. The reason there’s no official hotel is that there are numerous business-class hotels nearby, and after a close call last year we didn’t want to take the financial risk of booking out a room block.
Our intent at this time is to book the venue to fire code capacity, which is why we may be able to open additional slots after we confirm everything. That means _both venue rooms will be full at all times. _You will not be permitted to stand or sit in the aisles, back of the room, or block the doorways. If the session you hoped to attend is full, you’ll need to go to the other one. Keep in mind we’re recording everything, so you won’t miss out entirely.
The last sessions on all three days will only have a single session. We’ll position the speaker in one of the two rooms, and we’ll live-stream to the other room. This is where we plan to put Jeffrey Snover’s talks, both to accommodate what has historically been high interest in his sessions, and to accommodate his total inability to do a session in only 45 minutes :). If you don’t get a chair in the “live” room, you’ll need to join from the “overflow” room.
The two rooms are actually in different buildings, separated from each other by a driveway/courtyard arrangement. We’re suggesting that you not bring your ginormous 21" laptop, since it’ll just drag you down moving between sessions. Maybe stick with a Surface if you want to take notes and stuff. Although we’re recording everything, so… you know. Maybe just enjoy the session.
Lunches will be taken in the session rooms, with buffet setups in the hallways just outside each room.
Stay tuned for further details, and please use the Summit forum to ask questions.

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. _
The specifics:

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. It gives it a sort of built-in immunity against bad community-contributed questions, because those eventually filter out of the assessment that’s delivered to people. It’s pretty engaging, actually. I’ve had some fun taking some web development-oriented assessments, and surprised myself in a few places.
They’ve got a PowerShell assessment. Why not jump in, take it, and then add some questions of your own? Next time you need to interview someone for PowerShell chops, send ’em to Smarterer.

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. If you must include screen shots, please embed them in the doc, but also include them as a a separate PNG in your e-mail.
You can write about anything, provided it’s PowerShell-related._ _What’s best? Some challenge that stumped you - and that you eventually solved (and please, tell us how). Something that you think folks could benefit from, or could learn to do better. Even an article that lays out both sides of a particular question, and outlines the pros and cons of each argument. Doesn’t matter. What matters is that you write. _
I will personally commit to reading every single one, and providing you with feedback on your article. When suitable, I’ll make some specific suggestions for improving the article. If you then fix it up accordingly, I’ll run it by a professional editor - and I’ll have it published. _In some cases, we’ll publish it right here on PowerShell.org. In other cases, I’ll submit it to my friends at 1105 Media for their consideration in one of their IT magazines, like Redmond Magazine or MCPMag.com. Still others will go into the PowerShell.org TechLetter, which would be a huge help to our editors, who are always hungry for content.
Being able to communicate well is important in all walks of life, but being willing to share is even more important. Think you’ve got nothing to share? _Wrong. _You have unique experiences that everyone can learn from. You do not need to be an expert in order to have something valuable to share. We would all benefit a lot more if more people shared their experiences and successes - so now it’s your turn.
The deadline is November 30th, of course, and I’ll work my way through them all as quickly as possible. You’re not going to be judged on your grammar or spelling (although do use Word’s tools to help those as much as it can). Don’t try to write fancy, or overly formal. In fact, just write like you’d talk. Read your piece back to yourself _aloud, _and if it sounds weird, fix it so it doesn’t. If it sounds good, it’ll read well.
C’mon. Take up the challenge. And tweet folks over to this article, too. Let’s make it a thing. My goal is to help at least a few folks because regular bloggers, either here or elsewhere, and my dream is to find maybe a couple of folks who can pick up a full-time column with a magazine or other publication. That’d be awesome. I know you’re out there - let’s get the party started.