The Ashdar Partners Blog

I have finished watching the PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2018 presentations on YouTube that caught my interest. If you have any interest in applied PowerShell, I suggest that you have a look at their playlist . there are nearly 60 presentations and I'm sure that something in there will interest you. If not, PowerShell.org has many other presentations . After finishing up the PowerShell presentations, I went looking for some good tutorials on Jira. I found a lot of marketing, but I didn't find much on useful, implementable details. Some of that seems to be due to Jira being flexible enough to do whatever you want. That's great, but my problem is that I'm not at the point where I know what I want. I will just endeavor to persevere on this front.  For the past week or two, I've been spending more time with Trello than I had been. I had a ten minute look at Kanbanflow , which seems like a worthy competitor to Trello. All of this activity is the fault of my rea...

I've watched so many of the Powershell + Devops Summit 2018 videos in the last week that I've lost track of the best ones. I won't bore you with a list. I'll just point you to the official Ashdar Partners twitter feed . The feed shows all of the videos that I've liked. I have three more videos from the Summit that I want to watch. After that, I'll be switching focus to Jira for a while because one of my clients has adopted Jira and I feel a little lost. After Jira, I'll be going back to the SQL PASS 2016 videos that I put aside a few months back. With my recent certification and the way that the IT universe seems to be going, I am starting to believe that Azure is the future. I'm also on a kick to read more. I have a good local library and I should take more advantage of it. I have three branches within easy driving distance, including the main branch, and I have easy access to any book at any branch through their inter-branch loan system. After f...

I took advantage of the following learning opportunities: PowerShell Team: Using PowerShell From a Browser to Manage Cloud Resources by Danny Maertens on YouTube CSV, JSON and XML (Oh My!) by Jeff Hicks on YouTube WebJEA: PowerShell driven Web Forms for Secure Self-Service by Mark Domansky on YouTube Perhaps more interestingly... Last week, the library didn't have the books I was actually looking for, so I picked up  The Phoenix Project  by Kim, et al. I should have read this book a couple of years ago. I've seen this book recommended as required reading for greater DevOps understanding a few times. I've been following the DevOps movement for a while, at a distance. I haven't paid much attention to DevOps's underpinnings or the scope of it's ideas. People don't hire me to re-engineer their business processes. As I did with TDD over ten years ago, I have adopted what I can of DevOps, according to my understanding of it. "DevOps" is usu...

I am slowly going through all of the PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2018 talks that I find interesting. I took advantage of the following learning opportunities: Whip Your Scripts into Shape: Optimizing PowerShell for Speed  by Joshua King  on YouTube Application Provisioning with DSC and Octopus Deploy  by Josh Duffney  on YouTube PlatyPS: PowerShell Help meets Markdown  by Sergei Vorobev  on YouTube Defending against PowerShell Attacks-In theory and in practice  by Lee Holmes on YouTube

I passed the 70-767 Implementing a Data Warehouse  exam this week. I first read Kimball's Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit and The Data Warehouse Toolkit over fifteen years ago, so it's about time. I still have those books, although many other books have hit the recycling bin. A lot of the underlying technology has changed in the data warehousing area, but a grounding the basics of facts and dimensions is still important. I passed the exams for  Querying Microsoft Server 2012/2014  and Administering Microsoft SQL Server 2012/2014 Databases , a while back. My Microsoft Learning dashboard points tout that this third success qualifies me as a "Microsoft Certified Professional". The last time I was Microsoft-certified in anything was in 1998, when I had a certification in Windows 98 desktop support, or some such thing. I don't think I ever did anything with that. Co-incidentally, I used the last of my last business cards while attending a talk on Machine Learn...

Here are the learning opportunities that I took advantage of last week: The Build Release Pipeline Model for Mere Mortals by Ryan Coates on YouTube PowerShell Team: Inventory Your Server Environment and Detect Change at Scale by Jenny Hunter on YouTube

Here are the learning opportunities that I took advantage of last week. Due to my interest in and use of DbaChecks , I need to get a better handle on PowerBI: Introduction to Power BI Desktop  with Dustin Ryan on  YouTube PowerBI seems to be the only reasonable way to visualize the results of the tens of thousands of tests I'm running. I could not resist watching a several things from the PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2018. The following are all from the Global Summit: Beyond Syntax: Pester Testing with Dave Wyatt on  YouTube Keynote: State of the Community with Don Jones on  YouTube PowerShell 2018: State of the Art with Jeffrey Snover on YouTube A Historical Architectural Tour of PowerShell with Bruce Payette on YouTube Become a PowerShell Debugging Ninja with Kirk Munro on YouTube I don't usually listen to things like keynotes, but I find that Don Jones and Jeff Snover always have something valuable to share. I am surprised with...