New Year's Resolutions - 2018

Posted on January 2, 2018  •  3 minutes  • 472 words

Woah, 2017 flew by. I may not have achieved everything on my New Year’s Resolutions list from last year, but it did help me focus some of my efforts and I’m glad I put the list together.

To start off 2018, let’s revisit see what (if anything) got completed and set a new list for a new year.

2017, With Hindsight

1. One blog post a month. The only month I didn’t do a post was February, but otherwise I’m happy with the frequency of posts.
2. Take lunch breaks. I didn’t exactly go outside… or eat, but I did force myself to at least switch to doing personal stuff (normally PowerShell) during my lunch hour. I consider that progress.
3. See if any locals are interested in a PSUG. I didn’t do much on this actively, though it is a fairly small IT community locally and the percentage of that community interested in PowerShell probably isn’t actually that large. I did start attending virtual user group meetings, which has been awesome!
4. Submit session (or two) for consideration at the 2018 PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit. I ended up submitting two session proposals for consideration and one, “Whip Your Scripts into Shape: Optimizing PowerShell for Speed ”, was accepted! Let this be an example putting your ideas forward being worth it.
5. Provide regular updates to BurntToast. What was I thinking? One minor update a month? Yeah, that didn’t happen. 2017 saw four updates being released which were downloaded over 6,000 times.
6. Start streaming again. I took the plunge in November and started streaming PowerShell content on YouTube and have been having a lot of fun with it. If you’re at all interested, please do check out my channel .
7. Learn DSC and Pester. Work bought the DSC and Pester books on LeanPub, which I’ve started reading. I didn’t do any actual work with DSC last year, but I did make an effort to start writing Pester tests for my various scripts at work.

New Year, New Resolutions. The 2018 List

1. Two blog posts every month. I’ve started building momentum and I have a growing list of ideas, why not aim for more posts?
2. Speak at PSUG. I imagine this would end up being a virtual thing, but if the opportunity to present in person came up, I certainly wouldn’t say no.
3. Do a community lightning demo at the PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit. I’m already attending and speaking at the summit, why not take the opportunity to show off BurntToast in action while I’m there?
4. Find, and stick to, a streaming schedule. This will help make the streaming thing a habit and help viewers know when they can expect me to be online. Both good things.
5. Configure a (production) server with DSC. It’s one thing to learn about it, let’s aim to actually use it