PSConfAsia : My experience

Since it has been few weeks after PowerShell conference Asia, I have finally kicked of the laziness and made up my mind to blog about my experience around it.

PowerShell Conference Asia

Initial Hurdle

The first thing that came to my mind was.....Cost!. I will circle back to this factor at the end.

Background

Milton, one of the organizers & friend asked me if I could speak about Pester. I was doing some stuff with Pester at that time and was reading the below book:

Test Driven Infrastructure with Chef by Stephen Nelson-Smith

This book gives you background on Why, What and How aspect of testing philosophy. These might sound very silly to the Devs, but being System Admin who just stepped up his game, I needed these questions answered.

While reading this book, I had glimpses of past when I had a notion that Testing is for Devs only. Till that point, the below sums up my testing methodology :

I made a note that in my session, I would focus more around the philosophy rather than the technical details as there are already great resources for Pester out there.

Finally Singapore -> PSConfAsia

The conference was my first PowerShell event outside India.

I was amazed to see the energy level of the crowd. Everyone was carrying laptops, handhelds or notebooks and I found many people taking notes, generating PowerShell transcripts etc.

I met few of the participants and was surprised to see that many participants were Developers, who were already using PowerShell. While interacting with people their, I realized that PowerShell has been a key to the evolution of managing Infrastructure for shops running Windows. 

Sometimes I wonder if, It was all part of grand scheme, orchestrated by Jeffrey Snower & PowerShell team at MSFT to turn an average Windows Admin (GUI driven) to a full blown automation driven ninja.

During the conference I had a pleasure meeting all the people whom I know via Social Networks. There were so many sponsored goodies for the participants that I was wondering if I would have been one e.g. F1 Ticket, iPad mini, DSC, DevOps related books, PowerShell Studio license by Sapien and many more.


Below are few of snaps :



KeyNote by none other than Jeffrey Snower himself (via Skype)

Nana and Ravi Sir - Just before their session :)
There sessions were my favorite on DSC and Infra as Code.

Panel discussion revolving around DevOps, Infra as Code etc. This was fun as we got to hear from the some well known names in the IT industry.

From Left to Right - Ferninand Rios, Jaap Brasser, Ryan Yates, Ravikanth Chaganti, Narayanan (Nana) Lakshmanan and Jason Brown.

Below is a pic of how colorful the MSFT Singapore Office is :

First day Speaker's Dinner was sponsored by Kemp Technologies and we all enjoyed a lot of local delicacies.

Below Jaap making a joke about his Birthdate

Just a reference on how much awesome the place was, below is what we got in Dessert :)

Nana in background while delivering his DSC Internals session. Foreground is my machine (Using ISE  to make notes, this is how I roll :D )

Dell has a PowerShell BIOS Provider which exposes the BIOS settings as a PSDrive. Girish Prakash from Dell R&D delivered an informative session on why the implementation choose PS Providers over Cmdlets and demoed the Provider.

Later in the evening there were Drinks for everyone at a nearby cafe. Before that I went for a little stroll with Jaap and Eswar Koneti (It was mostly technical things We talked about)

Eswar and me

Jaap and Me

Hoping you get the below :

PS>"{0} > {1} > {2}" -f $Me, $Miton, $Ravi

Circling back to the Cost Factor the very first thing that came to my mind. Looking back at the experience of meeting people from PS Community and learning few things in the process, I have to say that it was all worth it.

I have started making plans already for a next conference.
Cheers