Articles from June 2018 on PowerShell.org - Welcome Automaters!

OnRamp Scholarship open to non-US Applicants

Wed, 27 Jun 2018 19:41:02 +0000

I have managed to clear the regulatory hurdles and our OnRamp Scholarship is now open to applicants from outside the US. We will update the application materials and web pages as soon as possible, but there’s no need to wait to submit an application.
There are two caveats:
first, the option to request a laptop as part of your application is not applicable to international applicants at this time.
Second, our airfare limit is $600 USD. We cannot directly book airfare costing more. Unfortunately, we also cannot provide a partial cash reimbursement at this time. That means your air must be under $600 total (which I realize is difficult), or you need to be responsible for the entire airfare yourself. This is a bit of accounting oddness that we should be able to address in the future.
Full information and applications are at the link above.

Looking for a PowerShell.org Contributor

Fri, 22 Jun 2018 15:24:43 +0000

We’re looking for someone who can publish a regular “What You Missed This Week” blog post on PowerShell.org each Friday (excepting the odd week off for vacations, of course).
This is meant just as a roundup of interesting posts from around the web; we know tons of people are blogging in their own spaces, and we’d like to call attention to some of the more noteworthy ones.
This isn’t any more complex than a brief blurb for each:

Don Jones shares the beginnings of PowerShell Summit: How PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit Began
PowerShell.org’s OnRamp Scholarship needs your help spreading the word: We Need Your Help.

There’s no minimum or maximum each week, although I personally suspect more than a couple of dozen posts will overwhelm people. The idea is to curate what’s out there, introduce folks who are getting their blogs going (and encourage them to keep going), and give the community some variety in its PowerShell diet.
If you’re interested, drop a line towebmaster@powershell.org to get hooked up with blogging rights here. As you do so, indicate if you’re up for every week (preferred) or every-other (in which case we’ll try and find two of you and get you to split even- and odd-numbered weeks). You can also volunteer to be an “aggregator,” feeding noteworthy articles to our main round-up-person each week to help them out.
If you’ve been longing to contribute but haven’t thought of a way, this could be a high-impact, low-workload way to jump in and help out!

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How PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit Began

Thu, 21 Jun 2018 23:37:07 +0000

Back in… gosh, 2009, 2010 or so, an Arizona company named NetPro hosted PowerShell Deep Dive, part of their The Experts Conference event (the first was held in Las Vegas for just 50 people). After hosting two years (I think) though, NetPro was purchased by Quest Software, which moved to close down TEC. I may have those years slightly off, but that’s the general sequence.
In 2012, myself, Jeff Hicks, Richard Siddaway, Jason Helmick, and Kirk Munro had formed PowerShell.org, attempting to make good on the basically-defunct PowerShellCommunity.org that I’d started and that Quest now basically owned (and was shutting down).
In August 2012 Jason and I were out in Redmond for a TechMentor conference, and…

Erin Chapple and Kenneth Hansen, who were running the PowerShell team at the time, asked us over to building 43 for lunch one day. They told us that community engagement was huge for them–they needed to know how people were using their product, and what they needed to focus on. They got plenty of engagement at TechEd events, they said, but it was largely beginners; they needed the Deep Dive, or something like it, to stay in touch with hardcore users.
In April 2013, the first PowerShell Summit was held.
“We can’t give you any money, though,” Kenneth said. And for good reason: they wanted an event that could sustain itself, so that when Microsoft inevitably reorganized and got distracted, the event wouldn’t die. To help, they volunteered to get us space on-campus, so our first event was in conference rooms, and they helped guarantee the food deposits. That helped give us a tiny financial pad and some experience, so in 2014 when we moved to Meydenbauer Center, we weren’t a brand-new event with an inexperienced team.
Today, Summit is formally owned by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and venue and food deposits no longer have to go on my personal Amex ;). We’ve built enough operating margin that Summit can pay its own deposits until registrations start rolling in, and the event is essentially self-sustaining–we don’t even rely on corporate sponsors, although we’re very happy to have them when we can. We’ve held six events in the US, and two in Europe, which led to the launch of PSConf.eu a few years back.
Jason ran across this page in his journal last night and sent the photo, and with his permission I thought it would be a fun piece of community history to share.

We Need Your Help.

Sun, 03 Jun 2018 19:23:52 +0000

We need your help.

As you may have heard, we’re launching a new “OnRamp” track at PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2019. Limited to 40 students, this will be a hands-on class designed to bootstrap someone into the technology and our community. There’s a whole brochure about it!

We’re also offering a number of free-ride scholarships designed to cover admission, air, and hotel, to help increase the diversity of our field and community right at the top of the funnel. Half of our scholarships will be awarded to individuals from groups that are traditionally underrepresented in IT, and that’s where we need your help.

We need to get the word out to potential applicants so that they know to apply!

You can help by directing people to ourScholarship Page or to the brochure URL. Who should you send?

The computer science teachers at your local high school, technical college, and community college.
Your local library’s educational outreach team.
IT interns in your own company.
Anyone in touch with individuals just coming out of high school or a technical program!

Yes, it’ll mean some legwork to find them and call or otherwise contact them - but we’re a team of less than eight unpaid volunteers, so we can’t do it all ourselves.

You can also reach out to local television news teams and ask them for help - many already run community outreach programs and can help spread the word.

Also tell your peers and colleagues via social media, word of mouth, whatever works. Get them to help, too, so that we can reach as many local communities as possible with this offer.

We appreciate your efforts - we’re trying to do as much as we can to strengthen and diversify our community, but it can’t happen without your active involvement.

Thank you.

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