Adam the Automator

When it comes to security, one of the scariest situations is when you’ve got a rampant piece of malware doing it’s bidding across the network. Multiply that situation by 10 when you find out that malware is running with local administrative privileges across all of your computers. But how do you know? This malware has sneaked past your perimeter defense and your workstation antivirus. It’s clear…

Over time, Active Directory (AD) can get messy. With multiple people making changes and with such an extensive database of objects, lots of unnecessary objects are bound to be created and left behind especially over many years. One type object in AD that’s infamous for becoming out of control is the GPO. Over time, GPOs can be applied over other GPOs, be linked to organizational units (OUs) with…

PowerShell holds a scripter’s hand quite a bit, but it can’t read your mind. It can’t inherently know what kind of output you’re looking for. It will provide its best guess, but it’s up to you to ultimately decide how you’d like output returned.

PowerShell has a formatting systemthat has default output and the ability to change how output is formatted on an object type basis. If you’d rather not…

Remote work is a topic that’s near and dear to my heart you can immediately tell if you follow me on Twitter. Many companies still refuse to allow remote work or simply don’t understand it doesn’t mean these kinds of jobs aren’t possible!

Web Resources for Remote Work

I have been working 100% remotely for about three years now and mostly remote for nearly five years before that. To get in a…

How do I deal with being interested in so many things at once? That’s a question I ask myself all the time.

I love software development; I’m interested in code. I enjoy cloud automation stuff. I like productivity tools and on and on. I’m the type with the ADHD personality where I see a squirrel and go following it. I go after every single piece of new technology that I know and discover. I had a…

Have you ever heard the term “code abstraction”?  The word means creating an interface of sorts around another piece of code that compartmentalizes that code. Think of it as an action or task that bundles a bunch of code up into a package which could then be used later.

The concept is like a function. In PowerShell, we have the Get-Content command. When you run the Get-Content, it doesn’t just…

Sticky Product – Falling on the Grenade for Your Team and Your Career

Today, I am going to talk about Sticky Product. It may have a bad connotation but allow me to tell you more about it.

In your work environment, in IT for example, there’s always this product or service (it could be a software, a concept like certificates, the Citrix environment, or some test environment) that no one touches because it’s old and is considered a legacy product.

Then, suddenly a…

I want to discuss a little bit about meetings and mental health and really sticking to goals. To go over this, I want to tell you a small story, a story about meetings. We’re all in meetings, usually, if you’re in IT or in any corporate job at all, you’ve probably gone to a meeting.

Meetings are abused

Meetings are traditionally the bane of a knowledge worker’s existence. Meetings have a bad rap…

When trying to get a meeting set up with someone, does this email thread sound familiar? If so, this Calendly review post is for you.

Email #1: “What time is good for you?” Email #2: “I’m open between 2-5PM on Thursday.” Email #3: “Is that your time or my time?” Email #4: “CST” Email #5: “Nah. I can’t do that. What about 1PM PST?” Email #6: “I think that should be OK.” Email #7:“OK, I’ll send you a…

The PowerShell Start-Sleep cmdlet or the sleep alias is a simple cmdlet with a single purpose; to pause a script. When executed, in the PowerShell console, a script executed by the console or in the PowerShell ISE, the cmdlet pauses merely a script or module in the PowerShell session from running until the required time in seconds or milliseconds have elapsed.

This cmdlet is simple yet can be…

Copy-Item: Copying Files like a Boss in PowerShell

Copying files. It’s not sexy but has to be done. In the GUI, we copy and paste with the clipboard but in PowerShell we have a cmdlet called Copy-Item.

Commands for copying files have been around forever in all shell languages. In PowerShell land, the most popular way to get a copy of a file or folder in your PowerShell script from point A to point B is by using the PowerShell Copy-Itemcmdlet.…

Invoke-Command: The Best Way to Run Remote Code

http://bit.ly/2ypWbdr

IT professionals rarely work just on our local computer. Using the PowerShell Invoke-Command cmdlet, we don’t have to! This cmdlet allows us to seamlessly write code as if we were working on our local computer. By using the PowerShell Remoting feature, The Invoke-Commandcmdlet is a commonly used PowerShell cmdlet that allows the user to execute code inside of a PSSession.…

“I Don’t Have Time to Automate” Yes, you Do.

“I don’t have time”.

What these people mean when they say they don’t have time – especially when they say they don’t have time to automate, is that they genuinely don’t want to. Perhaps people don’t believe they have the chance to automate. Whatever the case may be – automation takes time to see any benefits. However, the current mindset is focused on immediacy rather than into the future;…

Get-AdUser: A Cmdlet a Day

Get-AdUser is our first PowerShell cmdlet for the day! If you’re in IT, chances are you’ve got some implementation of Microsoft’s Active Directory (AD). A huge part of AD is users. Users are what gets assigned to individual employees, service accounts, etc. Get-AdUser is a cmdlet inside of the freely available Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) package.

Once you have the ActiveDirectory…

The Two Step Guide to Upgrading to PowerShell 5.1

PowerShell 5.1 has been out now for nearly a year, but I’ve found that many companies have yet to upgrade. Perhaps the reason they haven’t updated is that they’re at PowerShell 5.0 and don’t see the need to upgrade or they’ve built code in the v2 days where they feel like something may break. If you do decide to upgrade, I’ve created a technical how-to with some scripts to automate this process…

How to Create Arrays for Performance in PowerShell

Is your script taking too long to execute? Speed it up with this handy tip.

Creating arrays in PowerShell is a common occurrence for any scripter. Arrays are an important data structure in any language and PowerShell is no different. However, not all arrays are the same. In fact, in PowerShell, the word “array” is usually treated as a generalized term meaning only one type of data structure to…