Matthew Hodgkins

Explore articles and content from this author

Matthew Hodgkins

5 articles published

August 26, 2016 • 1 min read

Ultimate PowerShell Prompt Customization and Git Setup Guide

Do you spend hours a day in PowerShell? Switching back and forth between PowerShell windows getting you down? Have you ever wanted “Quake” mode for your terminal? If we are going to spend so much time in PowerShell, we may as well make it pretty. Check out the Ultimate PowerShell Prompt Customization and Git Setup Guide for how to: Install and customize ConEmu Enable Quake Mode for your terminal Setup your PowerShell Profile Install and use Posh-Git Generate and use SSH Keys with GitHub Squash Git commits

Read Article

Tips and Tricks Tutorials

June 9, 2016 • 1 min read

5 Tips for Writing DSC Resources in PowerShell 5

PowerShell 5 brought class based DSC Resources, which majorly simplifies the process of writing custom DSC resources. During my time working on some custom resources, I developed some tips a long the way which should save you some time and pain during your DSC journey. The tips cover: Structuring your class based DSC Resources Making it easier to get IntelliSense based on your DSC resources without constantly copying them into the module path Using PowerShell ISE IntelliSense when writing DSC configuration Troubleshooting resources which aren’t being exposed correctly from your DSC Module Testing classed based resources with Pester Head over to https://hodgkins.

Read Article

DevOps PowerShell for Developers Tips and Tricks Tools

May 19, 2016 • 2 min read

Making Awesome Dashboards from Windows Performance Counters

Having an understanding of your systems performance is a crucial part of running IT infrastructure. If a user comes to us and says “why is my application running slowly?”, where do we start? Is it their machine? Is it the database server? Is it the file server? The first thing we usually do is open up perfmon.exe and take a look at some performance counters. You then see the CPU on the database server is 100% and think _ “was the CPU always at 100% or did this issue just start today?

Read Article

DevOps Tools Tutorials

January 28, 2016 • 2 min read

Using PowerShell to enable ChatOps on Windows

ChatOps is a term used to describe bringing development or operations work that is already happening in the background into a common chat room. It involves having everyone in the team in a single chat room, then bringing tools into the room so everyone can automate, collaborate and see how automation is used to solve problems. In doing so, you are unifying the communication about what work gets done and have a history of it happening.

Read Article

DevOps PowerShell for Admins PowerShell for Developers Tips and Tricks Tools Tutorials

June 5, 2015 • 2 min read

Automating with Jenkins and PowerShell on Windows

Take a minute think about how many PowerShell scripts you have written for yourself or your team. Countless functions and modules, helping to automate this or fix that or make your teams lives easier. You spend hours coding, writing in-line help, testing, packaging your script, distributing it to your team. All that effort, and then a lot of the time the script is forgotten about! People just go back to doing things the manual way.

Read Article

Tips and Tricks Tools Tutorials