Hello!

I’m sat here in a hotel just off the Stadt park in what is quite possibly the most beautiful city in the world: Vienna! And I’m here because I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak at PSConfEU 2022. It was the first time I have ever attended this fantastic conference, and it was great finally meet some people who’s blog posts I had read over the years.

Sunday for me started early in Carshalton in the UK: luckily I was able to get a lift form my wife as we live close to Gatwick. I then spent a considerable amount of time waiting for my flight because I got to the airport early. Quite frankly my anxiety levels are bad enough without the thought of the risk of missing my flight. Hoever I got to Vienna easily enough, and the train from the airport is quick, and the hotel was merely yards away form the station. So I checked in, waited for the temoerature to drop to tolerable levels, and headed out to take a look around this city.

I stopped off at the cathedral to light a candle and say a prayer, then went to a place around the corner to Reinthaler’s Beisl, who do great wienerschnitzel. Then I headed back to the hotel to aply some Mario Strikers on the Switch.

Monday was the first day of the conference, and it was great to hear from the PowerShell team as they spoke about the changes coming in PowerShellGet3, which is very exciting. Having used python quite a bit lately I’ve much preferred the use of virtual environments for developing, and wished that PowerShell had the same thing. Well, PSGet3 does not quite add all of that, but what it will do is allow users to download the modules where they wish, and have a requirements.txt-like feature as well. So all good things.

I was still quitefull from all the food I’d eaten all day so Monday I admitted defeat and grabbed myself a cheeseburger from McDonalds. I just needed somethingsmall and quick whilst I went on a long walk around the city.

Come Tuesday I went to talks about mocking in Pester, and then a talk about writing PowerShell tasks to use in Azure DevOps. I do think tasks are awful, but wanted to see if the session would chagne my mind. It did not. This is not to say that hte speaker was wrong as they had their own reasons for using them, but I’d much prefer to write PowerShell modules and consume them rather than use tasks.

By Wednesday I had decided that I could get used to eating watermelon for breakfast every day, as well as free chilled diet cokes. Honestly I lost count how many I had a day. I spent some time finsishing off my presentations. I loathe lots of demos as people tend to dwell on getting them perfect, but the reality is is that they can fail on matter how many times you rehearse them. So I decided to run the pester tests on the module that I was talking about as a compromise to demoing features.

Wednesday evening was the speaker meal, and it was very enjoyable being able to get to know some of the speakers; there were about 40 or so of us, so for us all to spend some time away from the conference allows us to get to know each other.

I was on early on Thursday: 9AM. Still had a decent turnout to hear me talking about the exciting world of sas tokens on the Data Lake. I then attended a couple more sessions before leaving for the conference. The family are flying over tomorrow and we are all going to have a well earned city break, and I’ll get an opportunity to do some more sight seeing and food eating!

I’ve truly had a great time. If you do use PowerShell I recommend going to the conference next year, as there is a lot of positivity and optimism around PowerShell at this conference. To have some of the PowerSHell team fly all the way over is a big plus, as you get to speak to them and hear their thoughts on where they want PowerShell to go. I’ve already had an idea for a conference talk next year, so I’m definitely going to submit again.