Transcript
community. And now here's your host, Andrew Plaw. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the PowerShell podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Plaw at Andrew Plaw Tech. And I am very pumped for today's guest. I've known this guy since last year's PowerShell Summit. And pretty much every single person I've talked to in this space has had something very nice to say about him, which makes a lot of sense. He's very authentic. He's very funny. He's very knowledgeable, too. He's put in the reps. He's passionate about PowerShell. He is an IT automation specialist, a PowerShell lover through and through. He works across the whole stack, endpoint management, Azure Intune Graph API, configuration as code and more. He's the kind of person who sees a manual process and physically cannot leave it alone. His official bio says that he's an ADHD IT analyst with an automation coping mechanism. Wow. He's fresh off the heels of PowerShell Summit 2026 as a first time speaker. And we're going to get into it. We're going to start off with some beginner topics, maybe talk a little bit of event logs and writing code outside of VS Code, like in the terminal. And then we're going to dive into some deeper topics like AI, his takeaways from Summit and more. Welcome to the show, Lucas Allman. Lucas. Oh, hi. Didn't see you there. Excuse me. Yes. Thank you for your time. This whole thing? Oh, don't worry about that. Just another day in the office, huh? It's going quite well. I'm excited to see you. I appreciate you agreeing to do this because you've been on PowerShell Wednesday before. I think we did a bar session before, right? Never a proper episode. Never a proper episode, but that's OK. I was just waiting for my time to shine, you know. Yeah, I feel kind of bad about that. You've definitely been deserving. But before I get into all the good stuff, because I really enjoy talking to you, as a lot of people do, as we saw at Summit, you're a very busy guy. I want to talk about some beginner topics that you thought would be helpful, starting off with event logs and using them in PowerShell. Can you give us a little bit of what options do we have there? Yeah, so this is something that it's fresh on my brain because I gave a little bit of a talk at my company about it. And it's one of those things where I wanted to be able to spread a little bit of knowledge about how I usually attack a problem, how I usually attack some troubleshooting. The first thing to note is there is a command within PowerShell. It's built right in. You don't have to do anything to get it. And it is get-winevent. The purpose of this command is to get events from the Windows event log, aptly named. Now, just something to know, just a little bit of a trip up, maybe. There are actually two commands. There is, I think, get-eventlog. And there is get-winevent. And the modern command is get-winevent. But apparently, get-eventlog is the older but faster version of the command. I don't know that, and I have no experience with it because I've only ever used get-winevent. But that's one thing to know and one little piece of knowledge that might be helpful because apparently the old command doesn't have access to all the Windows event logs, only some of them. Whereas get-winevent, you can get any event log that your heart desires. So just something to keep in mind. What's great about it is you can use it to find what event logs are available on the computer, either by the log name or by the provider. Often you have a provider that's going to give events to multiple logs. And so sometimes it's better to find it by the provider name than it is by the log name so you're not missing out on some of the events. Yeah, I did a little song and dance about it just to show some tricks, some ideas. Because I don't know about you, Andrew, but when I have to wait for the event log to open up, boy, oh, boy, I can go make a coffee before that thing opens up. And even then, you've got to filter, you've got to scroll, you've got to look. And these are exactly those kind of manual steps that we are here to take away with PowerShell, that we are here to make more efficient. So I think that's one of the reasons I wanted to bring it up with them, was I wanted to show them, hey, here's this command. It can help you find what's there a little quicker, but also it can help you use our friend where object to start searching for keywords within that message. We can use that to start searching for the error type. You might be inundated with informational messages. But what you really want, you want to get to the core of the problem, you want to find the errors. And so you can pipe that to where object, and you can get that as well. You don't have to use where object though, because the get when event command itself actually comes with a bunch of great features, such as the filter hash table. And the filter hash table will allow you to create a hash table of many different properties, including ID of the error or the log name, or the severity. So are you looking for warnings? Are you looking for errors, information, etc? You can do all that from right within the get when event command and get some of the output that you're looking for. So very powerful command for troubleshooting. I was showing them where the Intune logs were, where the group policy logs were. It can make it a lot easier to try to diagnose what's going on, especially in a hybrid environment, you know, trying to figure out, okay, what's affecting that setting. So yeah, just a basic command. But sometimes if nobody tells you that it's there, you won't know. Yeah. I mean, even knowing it's there, but thinking about how to create tools around it, by the way, fantastic, boombastic explanation. But it's such a, you know, like you were mentioning how long it takes to open. That's a huge one. And we talk a lot, like, what can be your first power? So when I think for some people is absolutely could be it. Find some logs that are relevant to you. You can look them up, which ones are important, put them into a script, query them like little by little, expand that. All of a sudden, you can get tons more visibility without having to spend a ton of time clicking on things, changing context, and a little bit of a win that you can share with others, perhaps. Absolutely. And I'll tack on a little grade A tip from Lucas Solomon here. If you are finding yourself in the event log for a specific issue, or you're always, you're always looking for the same sets of issues, whatever it is, if you're in there, and you're filtering, and you're looking for specific things, you already know what you're looking for, you've got a filter that you've got in mind. The next time you're in that filter pane, head on over to that XML pane, that's the tab that's right next to it, you can actually copy out that XML or that XPath, I think it's XPath, that filter logic, that syntax, and you can toss that at the get win events command. So now you're cutting out that time that it takes to actually open the win events, event log MMC. But you've also got that filter locked and loaded. And boom, you can run it right away. Maybe you save it on a network share, maybe you got it in a GitHub gist, or something like that. You can pull it in, run your filter, and just right away see what that problem is. So there you go, that's for free. Oh, you know, Lucas, when you said you got a little pro tip, I was thinking, am I gonna know what he's gonna say? Was I gonna say it too? And I did not have that one in mind. You know what tip I had in mind, actually, too? You know, if we're looking at event logs, we can write to the event log too, we got scripts, right? Maybe as time goes on, that might be a good spot for us to throw a couple things, maybe we have some other tool that can pull it for us. Other one to bring things a little full circle and let them have some fun. You can trigger scheduled tasks based on a particular event log, which could be cool for a couple different purposes. You got some pivot points, we got PowerShell, you got Lucas Allman, it's gonna be a great episode. And I'm so glad everyone is joining us. I guess, like, comment, subscribe. Now's a good time to, you set me up so nice, Lucas, everybody's happy out there. That's right. Yeah, you know, it's funny about that too, is as you were talking about your tips, I'm so glad that was your second tip, because I was starting to formulate a joke in my brain. I'm like, you know, I don't want to raise your call here, Andrew, with another tip on a tip on a tip. But that was exactly the other tip I had in mind was, you know, schedule tasks, you can actually get a script, a scheduled task to start off of an event log trigger. And if you're making that event log happen in the first place, that's end to end process, baby. It's truly beautiful. It truly is. Man, if I know, if I'm like having the same tips as Lucas, I feel like a winner. So shout out to me for this one. I mean, this is a memory out of here, Andrew. Oh, well, we got more tips to share that we wanted to talk, you wanted to talk, and it's a great topic about writing code in the terminal instead of VS Code or ISE. What the heck are you talking about, Lucas? How can I do that? Well, let me explain. And if you need a more in depth explanation, I have a poorly maintained blog at lucasholman.com, where I have written a blog post about this. But this is just one of those things, you know, we're out here, we're doing PowerShell, we've got the ability to automate, we've got the ability to make our own custom functions. So you the more you can do, the more you start seeing opportunities for these things, right. And so I made myself a little function, because I don't know if you know this, Andrew, but you can actually write full functions, straight from within the interactive shell in PowerShell. You don't need VS Code, you don't need nvim, you don't need any of that, all you need is a shift button, and an enter key. Because shift enter in VS Code, you can't see my screen, but I'm doing it right now. And it's giving me new lines. And because of that, that I can do the whole function syntax, I can write an entire function, right within the interactive shell. And I do that quite often, you'll find yourself, you know, you're troubleshooting something, or you've got a you've got an issue going on. And it's across multiple devices. So you find yourself promoting and doing the same thing to a bunch of different devices. So sometimes what I want to do is just write a little function, make things a little quicker, make things a little start a function in the interactive shell, you're starting it with the keyword function, then you're going to give it a name, open curly brackets, and then you're off to the races, you run your you run your code. You don't even need shift enter. In fact, if you've written if you put that open curly brace there, you can hit enter in PowerShell smart, it's expecting you to close that curly brace before before it actually gets off and runs that command. So you're in the interactive shell, you've typed function, you've typed its name, you've opened your curly braces, you're typing your code, you hit enter, you've got your function, you run it, it works. It's fantastic, but you don't want to lose it. Because as I'm sure you know, Andrew, once I close that session, it's gone forever. It's like most of my thoughts, they've floated away like balloons, never to be recovered. I wrote a little command for myself. And I called it new function, no dash, just new function, all one word. And the reason for this was, I write a function in the terminal. And it's good. And you know, I've tested it, everything, I'm happy with it. If I hit up to get my history back, I get that little spot where I'm writing the function, I just go straight to the beginning, Control Home, take me straight to the beginning. And I just try type that n e w. And now it says new function, instead of function, I hit enter. And that kicks off the new function, function, which will take all of that thing that I just and save it to somewhere that I already told it where to save. I was using default parameters for that. So if you want more information about that, check out the blog. But yeah, you know, it's just one of those little time saving things where now I don't have to copy and paste. I don't have to put it into a notepad. I don't have to do anything like that. I can just up n e w. We're all good. And we've saved that for another day. So little grade A tip from Lucas. Can we can we vibe on this a little bit? Absolutely. Let's buy. Okay. Okay. Because I might have some ideas, too. I don't know. So let me just clarify, though. So you write a function. Normally, you just do function and then the name of the command and then that script block with everything inside of it. And so what you've done is basically instead of function, you just put your little keyword new function and then you have the name of the command. So like get my favorite events and then the code inside of a little curly brace script block where code can go. And I guess so you're looking for those types of arguments. You put together a thing and you said add it to your profile or where did you add it? So I've got a couple of different options. For me, I keep all of my functions separately in a functions folder. And then within my profile, it's, you know, it's not exactly dot sourcing it, but I have a build function that creates a separate functions profile. Maybe a little overengineered, but it's I just didn't feel comfortable having it dot source anything from that file every time I open up the shell. But, yeah, no, it you can you can change the output path. And in my blog, LukasAlman.com, what I did was I added a default parameter. So the output directory for that command would be my profile and it would default to append. So if you've got if you've just got your profile, you've just beginning, by the way, congratulations, you've got a profile, you're doing well. If you're using a profile in PowerShell, you're doing well. So if you've just got the one profile, you don't have all this build script in separate files and stuff. Yeah, you can set up this function to just append to your profile, point it to your profile. And every time you have a new, fun little tool that you want to have in there, you run the script, it adds it to your profile, set it forever. OK, I'm vibing with that. I have another idea. I mean, could this exist? Could this thing really exist that I'm about to mention? What about something that looks at the like recent run where a function is defined, you know, like the history or even the PS read line history file and it checks for it and it gets the function definition because it was written that way, right? It's going to have the definition from get command, which is cool. A lot of functions have that, which has like the actual code and you could maybe create it from that. And you know, it just there's many ways to get things accomplished. But maybe on top of that, we add a PS read line key handler. So we press like a little magical combo and boom, that thing we just wrote that worked is saved. What do you think, Lucas? Would that also work? Different strokes for different folks. But I mean. I think you already know the answer to that, Andrew. I think it's a smart idea from a smart guy. And by the way, to our listeners, if you just heard the words, And by the way, to our listeners, if you just heard the words PS read line key handler, and you have no idea what that is, whole boy, are you in for a treat? I suggest you Google that and get it figured out because, uh, you know, PS read line, it's, uh, it's not just about showing you stuff. It's not just about formatting stuff. There's a lot you can do with it. And in fact, sometimes I have to fight with it because when I switch over to like iTerm on macOS or something like that, you know, I, I love all OSs the same, you know, I don't see code, but really at its core, I'm a windows guy and I'm used to my windows set up and all that. Um, and so sometimes I got to spend some time fighting with PS read line to get everything back that I need, but you know, it's, you know, you give it the time, it gives it right back. Anything that can keep you in the terminal is always good. So, you know, what you're showing right here. Oh, I think, okay. There's your beginner tips, everybody. We're free now. We're going to have a little bit of fun here. All right, Lucas, we've been talking a little bit about AI and on the same kind of, I think getting cloud code and your terminal for me, very helpful, very seamless. If you already have a cloud subscription, um, I've really enjoyed that. Have you tried it yet? Just curious. So specifically cloud code, I still haven't tried. I still haven't, uh, haven't, haven't had a lot of experience with that. Um, and the main reason for that is, uh, we, you know, a lot of the things that I'm doing day to day is obviously for my day job. You're usually constricted within your job to the things that are acceptable within your job. Um, but we have GitHub enterprise licenses. We've got GitHub co-pilot, they've got the co-pilot CLI. So, you know, same stuff, different pile, different day. And, uh, I I've been experimenting a lot with that. Um, one of my, maybe a bit of a tangent, but one of my first experiences with the co-pilot CLI where I went, wow, that was actually kind of neat. Um, I was having an issue on my computer. I usually have it in dark mode, like dark mode. I don't like it to find me during the day. Um, but one day it was in light mode. Okay. Go into the settings, change it back to dark mode. And about four seconds later, it goes back to light mode. And I did this a couple more times and I kept going back, kept going back. And I said, I don't know what's going on here, but before I do anything, I'm just going to ask co-pilot. So I bring up the co-pilot CLI right from my windows terminal. I said, Hey, here's the problem. Well, what's going on? And it's like, okay, well, let me, uh, let me think about this. Let me look in this area and this configuration. And let me look under here and, Oh, I see. You've got power toys installed. Well, let me look at the configuration file for power toys. Uh, yeah, that's the ticket. There's a night shift function in power toys. Would you like me to turn that off for you? And I was like, no, it's okay. I got it from here. But like within seconds, it told me, yeah, Hey dummy, you've got something set up and you just kind of forgot about it, maybe turn that off and it'll fix your problem, which I thought was a really, it was just, I don't know. And it's not revolutionary, but that one tickled me. That was like, you know, I, it had access to, to run these commands. It asked for permission. It found out the problem and I was willing even to try to fix it, but I didn't trust it to fix it. So, uh, to answer your question with a, with a shorter answer, no, I haven't tried cloud code yet, but I've been experimenting with co-pilot CLI a whole lot. Very cool. Yeah. That's a lot of fun tools to be had. Okay. So we went to this thing called PowerShell Summit and you were a speaker and I want to hear about that experience, but you wrote a blog that I was checking out. Pretty good. Thanks man. Thanks. What were some of your takeaways from PowerShell Summit? Cause I wasn't able to see quite as many talks as you, cause I was kind of running around. Um, so I'd love to get your perspective on things. Yep. Uh, I can summarize it fairly easily with, uh, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI. That's, uh, that's, that's, if you can believe it, it's a lot of what we heard this year. Um, but it's more than that. It's, you know, I heard about AI last year at Summit as well. It's, you know, it's, it's permeating all things right now. And with good reason. Um, but thinking back, thinking even just the gap between what was possible, what we were doing with the tool sets between last year at Summit and this year at Summer, um, it's, it's really incredible just how far it's come and what people are doing with it. Um, but there was a few, there was a few key moments, key talks during Summit that really stuck with me, that really gave me something to think about, um, to the point where I came back and, uh, I was at my daily standup with my team and they're like, Hey, how was Summit? And I was like, great. And they're like, you tell us, tell us what you saw. And I think I went on a hour and a half diatribe about like, we need more AI. I've seen the light and like, I see it now. Um, and so like, if you're out there and you're like me and this, this describes you, um, you know, you, you're using AI, but it's, you know, you're, you're in the chat and you're asking it for things. You're asking it to make funny pictures of Andrew Pla and you also, maybe you're in VS code, you've got GitHub co-pilot and it's giving you some auto suggestions. And those are two really powerful uses of AI. Those are two very powerful tools. I think GitHub co-pilot in VS code is one of the, the best tools for, uh, that I've had added to the tool chest in, in years and years, it increases so much productivity. Um, but you're, you're, you're looking at what's out there and you're saying to yourself, I could be doing more with AI. You know, I've got this process and I feel like I could probably give that to AI and let it handle it. Um, but for me, there was like a, there was a disconnect between A and B. There's a disconnect between, I know what I can probably do and how do I get there? What am I missing from it? And one of my first takeaways was I'm actually not missing as much as I thought it was at its core. Um, AI was trained on the stuff that was for human consumption. It understands how to consume the things that humans have been consuming on the internet for so long. And it was how to consume natural language and documentation and all these things. And so you actually have the entire skillset that you need to utilize AI because you are able to communicate, you're able to write, you're able to, you know, save text to files. And as it turns out, you know, you need a sprinkling of instruction and, and, uh, guidance, but that's, that's the core to a lot of using AI is just writing instructions, writing your guardrails, writing your framework, whatever, you know, harness, whatever the, the key words are at this point. Um, and seeing, you know, I was talking on the, I was talking on the blog about, uh, Gilbert Sanchez, shout out Gilbert Sanchez, smart dude, very smart dude. Um, and he's just, you know, he's got his phone out and he's showing me all his cloud code stuff. And he's like, yeah, you know, I, we had this issue and had it put together a PR and it fixed the problem. And I checked it all from my phone, everything looked good. And he's got instructions for their release pipeline. You know, when we put out a new release, we want all the changes in the change log. We want the release to be written a certain way. And, uh, and you know, he's just put in the work for his AI pipeline to have all these instruction sets to do all these things. And it's, it's not, it's not rocket appliances. It's just text. It's just instructions, you know? Um, and so that was a big takeaway for me. It was, oh, this stuff is accessible. It is possible. Um, and so coming home, uh, I have a poorly maintained blog, lucasalmon.com. And I was looking at it after I put up my blog post, just got cozy in bed and I opened up on my phone. I realized my homepage, all of the entries for the blog posts are all of a sudden shifted to the left and slightly off screen. I'm thinking, oh, I just posted that. I just talked about it on blue sky. I'm going to have to go back and like fix this right now. Now didn't have to fix it right now. It didn't have to put it in that work because I have a junior dev working for me 24 hours a day called co-pilot. So I just, you know, open up the GitHub app said, Hey co-pilot, I got this problem. It's probably an easy fix. Can you put in, can you submit a PR to fix it for me? And it happily did that. It was one line of CS CSS. It's like, here's your problem, dummy. I got it. And he, it was right. It fixed it. And so it was that mindset shift of, uh, you know, the, these things aren't inaccessible. They're there and I can use them. And speaking of mindset shifts, Andrew, um, going to one of the talks that Jeffrey Snover did about AI and, you know, uh, Jeffrey Snover for those uninitiated, uh, inventor of PowerShell, the wizard behind everything that, uh, that we hold so dear. Um, he's gone on to be many a fellow. He was a technical fellow at Microsoft and then a fellow at Google. And now five weeks into retirement, he decided, you know what? I'm going to become a fellow at Harvard law. So now he's at Harvard law and he's doing AI stuff. He's doing all kinds of wonderful and crazy things around the ethics of AI and where it's going next and things like that. Um, he gave a talk and his basic premise was we are all insane. And the idea was insanity is having a completely disconnected or different worldview from reality. And it's not that we've been looking at things wrong. It's that reality has very quickly changed under our feet. And so, you know, this is, this is Jeffrey Snover inventor of PowerShell CLI guy. He said, I'm not a gooey guy, but he needed to make a gooey. And he tried to find some people to make a gooey for him. And then somebody told him, you know what? Just buy code it. So he said, okay, fine. I'm going to buy a coder. And he did. And within about five weeks, he had something he was really happy with. And he says, turns out I was, I was insane. I thought I wasn't a gooey guy. I thought I was only a CLI guy. Turns out I'm a gooey guy. I'm a good gooey guy. And his whole story just kind of stuck with me because it was like, you know what? These tools are there to help us. These tools are there to help us learn, to give us new knowledge that we didn't have but also to, to get us a leg up, to get us started, to get some scaffolding to stuff, to fix issues. You know, it's, it can be a little daunting if you're used to making the thing, to being the IT hero, to solving the problem yourself with all of your PowerShell knowledge, it can feel a little daunting to give up control of that in a way that ultimately we're in control of the output of AI and what we do with it. But to give up this idea that it all came from you. And I think that that's the mindset shift that we need to embrace the fact that we can do so much more if we accept the reality that we have this new tool set that we just need to embrace and try to make more use of, you know? Yeah, I do know. That's interesting. I've let you speak less, Andrew. I mean, I just, I want to let it settle, you know, I learned from Snover, sometimes you got to let the words hit and you had some powerful words there. I think that we've seen a similar thing, at least I've seen it, in music production where there's this tendency for some folks to be very opposed to using samples or things that other people have done, loops, whatever, versus other people who just kind of embrace it as they think of it as like a collaborative thing. I think that may be sort of the role with AI and a lot of these instances where it's like, if you want to do it all by yourself for whatever reason, I mean, you can probably still get to the end line, but if you treat it as a collaborator and manage it as a system, as a systems engineer, right? Apply those cool skills that we've gotten. Well, I think you're going to be in for a little bit of a more powerful experience. You can get a lot more done, especially, man, we've seen this change so much in the past few years, and it's definitely in a new spot today than it was a year ago. I think the struggle, I guess, we'll call it a struggle. The struggle I was having with AI, I feel like it got intertwined with another struggle of mine, which is I love doing the work. I love PowerShell. I love building tools. I love when somebody comes to me and says, hey, I've got this problem and I would really like to not spend eight hours a day doing this. Can we figure it out? And then you find a way to use PowerShell to give them a new tool, to give them a new lease on life. And when I think about my career, I think about, okay, well, how do I go above where I am? How do I get more out of my career? And a lot of times the answers, the first answer that comes to our brain is becoming management, going from where you are to managing a team. And that can be scary for a lot of people, myself included, because it's giving up the work. It's giving up the thing that, you know, I love, I love PowerShell. I actually get a lot of satisfaction out of building things in PowerShell and doing that work. So I'm so happy that I have a job where I get to do that all day. But it could be really difficult if tomorrow someone said, okay, you've got five people working for you. You're not going to touch the keyboard anymore, but you're going to help them and you're going to talk to them. You're going to meetings all day and you're going to figure out what it is that they need to be told in order to have the right output and build the thing. And that's a mindset shift for sure. That's going from individual contributor to manager. And it's a similar mindset shift when it comes to AI tool sets. Like, did I really make this thing happen if all I did was ask AI to do it? And I think that's a struggle in my brain. I'm sure it's a struggle for a lot of people. It was a discussion we had on my team when I came home from Summit. And I think it's one of those things where you have to embrace this idea that if you If you want to get more done, if you want to get to the things that bring you the want to get more. most joy to create, then you've got to get some of the other stuff out of the way. You've got to give yourself the runway. You've got to give yourself the space to be able to spend time on those worthwhile and value add things. So, you know, it's a, it can be a little scary to, to think of this idea as, okay, I'm going to stop making the thing. I'm going to start asking something to do the thing for me, but it still requires a whole lot of, uh, technical knowledge and critical thinking. There's still a lot that goes into that, whether it's, it's ultimately you making the output or not. Um, but start with, don't start with the passion projects, start with the things you don't want to do. Start with the annoying things, start with the things that, um, you know, if you could give it to a junior dev and have them do it, you would, well, now you've got a bunch of them working for you 24 seven. So make use of those tool sets, you know? Um, yeah, it's, uh, it's a different way of thinking about things and it takes a little bit of time. And if it takes you a little bit of time, it takes you a little bit of time. Don't feel like there's a big rush. Don't feel like you have to understand this stuff tomorrow because Lucas Allman and lucasallman.com told you that you have to do that. Like take your time with this stuff because it is a huge change in technology. Lucas, I think you're right about that. I think that I want to get your perspective on this, right? Cause we came up in a time before this. And so for me, the process of learning PowerShell, of applying automations, of trying to like solve the root cause in a way that's repeatable and scalable and all that kind of stuff, it changed the way my brain works, right? Doing that enough, it rewires your brain to a certain extent. I am concerned that some people going forward will not put in those reps and they will therefore not be able to develop that perspective. I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like you do need to spend time learning. You can't just jump to the solution and be like, okay, this is what I want. It's going to be very hard to maintain anything and get any kind of quality and know where to look and know what to do and feel comfortable with it, taking on that responsibility. What are your thoughts, Lucas Allman? How can you save us? Yeah, it's a, here, let me save you. Um, no, it's, if you look at it from the perspective of, uh, technology goes through these, these shifts, these changes, these phases, and we've been through phases like this before. And then don't get me wrong. I don't want to downplay the dramatic change or the importance of AI. This is a, this is a huge shift generative AI is giving us something at an accelerated rate that even among technological accelerated rates. It's, it's fast. Um, I think that if you think about it from the perspective of somebody who came up in a generation, even before us, you know, where are these, where are they learning these things? Well, they've got textbooks, they've got books that were written. Maybe they've got coworkers who are showing them the ropes. Um, but there was only on man pages, of course, man pages. Um, there's only so many places to get the information. And so you have to sift through the documentation. You have to extrapolate. You have to do that level of critical thinking. Um, you could argue that the ability to Google your answer, uh, and find something on stack exchange and copy and paste it into VS code is a similar difference between then and what we've been experiencing for the last couple of decades, um, versus what's happening now and what future generations of it are going to experience. It's a different way of getting your information. It's a more tailored way of getting your information. So when I say, um, so I, I always laugh with my wife about this, where. I grew up with, you know, with a geek mindset. I knew exactly how to use the, the different, uh, keywords in Google. You know, I got to put quotes around this, a plus in front of exactly. Yeah. Which is such a dorky name for it. Huh. Um, you know, and she would always just ask a question to Google as did 99% of the planet. And then as things started to shift and evolve, that's exactly how Google expected you to use it. And it started to provide those kinds of results because as it turns out, there's a lot of people asking questions on the internet. And so that actually is a pretty good keyword search to ask a question and see who else has asked that question. And now you've got AI responses front and center on Google. And so if you're asking a question, you're getting a tailored response in return. And so it's, I've got this error and it's in an Intune configuration event log, and here's the background behind it. And it's like, oh yeah, no, I know exactly what you're talking about. This specific instance is because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, okay, well you didn't have to spend four hours shifting through different documentation and books and whatever it is. So have you, if you continue down that road, have you now lost the ability to figure these things out? Have you lost the ability to do a deep dive and find information? And I would say that while I see the point and I fear that future, I think the kids are going to be okay. I think we're going to make it and here's why. Again, we've been through this transition, you know, Googling answers versus only having a book. That's a big difference in where you go and how long you spend reading the You know, we are not pioneers of reading documentation by any means. And then this shift to AI, some of it is a responsibility of the user. How you use AI is going to make a big difference. I like to, I like to encourage people when you're trying to learn about a topic, when you're trying to figure out something, you know, you normally need that deep dive into the documentation, start asking AI, okay, this is what I need to figure out. Tell me the top three topics or subjects or like subtopics that I would need to know to diagnose this issue. And it's going to tell you, and then you can tell it, Hey, give me a syllabus for each of those. Give me a list of things. Give me, give me what I need to know. And of course, all of the usual caveats, you got to check that it's not hallucinating. It's not lying to you. Check the sources, all of that, but it's actually a fantastic tool for learning. If you use it in that capacity, if instead you use it as a, Hey, what is the specific answer to this specific problem type of tool? Are, are you going to lose the ability to do X, Y, Z? I don't know. Maybe I think there's a lot of places in life where you're still going to have to, there, there, there isn't going to be an AI attached to it, at least for a little while. Uh, and you're still going to have to spend the time doing that. But here's the thing. I would contend that the speed at which all of the technologies are moving and changing is directly proportional with how much AI is going to allow you to learn new things and learn new answers and keep up with it. If I had to read a book for every new technology, I needed to learn to solve a problem or to do, or to create a poorly maintained blog. Um, I'd be, I'd be three years behind where I am now, but if I have a tool that helps me keep up with those shifting technologies, a tool that itself is helping those technologies shift faster. I would argue that, well, yeah, it feels a little like we're losing a certain skillset. Um, it's also helping us keep up with a shifting world that we would fall behind on that much quicker if we relied only on the old way of doing things. So, you know, these things are a lot of, it's a lot of change, Andrew. Change is scary. And, uh, and you know, we've got to take it one step at a time and we've got to remember that we can't always apply the old mindset to the new world. New world order. NWO, the old wrestling thing. All right, Lucas, I feel you. And honestly, here's the thing, dude, there have been crappy IT people forever and there's good ones too. There's those who are going to go and listen to something like the PowerShell podcast and vibe out with Lucas Allman. There's others who are just going to kind of clock in and not really be invested in the security posture, not really care about making sure we're doing things best practice. It's like, you know, if they give them everybody local admin, that's just how it is. Um, so, you know, it's going to be just like it is people like us and our listeners out there. I think they're going to be in a much better spot for being the type that goes out there and seeks to gain understanding rather than just, uh, get to the end of the day because that's that long-term mindset that's going to set you up for long-term success. Absolutely. And I think in this industry too, you tend to get people with curious minds, people who want to know the answer. So whether or not you can just get the answer to the surface level question and have that be it, I think that for a majority of the good IT people out there, um, they're going to want to search for that deeper, curious answer, you know, and not just because AI exists, they're not going to stop doing that. Very true. Very true. Lucas, Lucas, Lucas, Lucas. It's been a heck of a year for you, my friend. Last year was your first PowerShell summit, right? That's right. Kind of like dove into the community headfirst and kind of a fun journey in that I think we talked about last time. Now you applied to speak at summit. Let's go through that. Why would you apply to speak at summit? What did you apply about? How'd you get accepted? Take us through. Sure. Um, so I think part of it is I've always been comfortable, you know, doing the group presentation. I've always been comfortable. Um, I was a theater kid. I was mostly tech for theater, but you know, I, I loved being the center of attention for things too. So, uh, I don't mind getting up in front of people and I got a little, I got a little taste of things when I did a lightning demo last year. And, uh, I think that, uh, I can probably, I can probably thank Jason Helmick for a piece of that because, uh, very first day I arrive at summit, I've been traveling all day. It's like eight 30 at night, everybody's in the lobby and then just getting to know each other and having a good time. And you could tell he was specifically seeking out people who were new to summit, uh, who hadn't been before. Um, because you want to talk to them. You wanted to get them involved in the community. And of course, Phil Bossman was with them to drumming up, uh, support for, uh, for lightning demos. Shout out to Phil Bossman. Um, and so they come over and Phil's like, oh, well, like, have you, like, you're going to have to look into the lightning demos and do that. I'm like, I'm already signed up. He's you're already signed up your first time summits here and you're already it's day one. It's actually day zero. Are you signed up? What are you, what are you doing for your lightning demo? And I was like, I explained it to him. I was, uh, you know, making scheduled tasks set of PowerShell data files. He's like, oh yeah, I saw that one on the list. That was really cool. And then Jason's ears perked up and he's like, what are you talking about? Cause I think PowerShell data files is just like a specifically, uh, you know, that's, that's a, that's a thing that he cares about. He's got ideas, he's got thoughts, he's got things he wanted to do with it. Um, and so I think that that just gave me the confidence to go out there and do it. That gave me that little bit of drive, you know, I, all these people who were PowerShell heroes of mine, they were just names and stories. And now all of a sudden they're real people in front of me. Um, I think that helped a lot. So it, it really was doing the lightning demo. So if you're going to summit, do a lightning demo. Um, it's a very supportive atmosphere. We've all got things to show off. I know you've got things to show off out there. So if you're going to summit, make sure you do a lightning demo. Um, but yeah, it started from there. I got a taste of the magic and I was like, I, I want more, I want more. And I knew, I knew that I, you know, this is going to sound like I'm tooting my own horn, but I knew I had the skillset to do it because of, you know, it's my first talk, but it's not my first time comfortably standing in front of people and talking their ear off about something I'm passionate about. And I think that's the key, right? Is if you know the topic, if you love the topic, you can talk about it for days and days. Um, and so I think I put forward about, I think I put forward four, uh, different, uh, uh, call for paper entries. Um, each one of them was 90 minutes because I had to be honest with myself. I said, 25 minutes, that's the intro. Yeah. I'm not even getting into the content within 25 minutes, 45, probably a more sane choice, but I got a lot to say. So I went with the 90 minutes, um, and it worked out, it worked out. I got one, one of them selected, uh, one of them wait-listed and the talk I ended up doing, uh, could be boiled down to here's a collection of things I've done over the last decade. And I'm going to talk about each one of them. Um, but really what it came down to was it is messy. It is not always perfect. Sometimes you get a vendor supported API and vendor supported command line, and you use those things and they work flawlessly or semi flawlessly. And when you have a problem, the vendor helps you out with it. Sometimes you have a not so supported API that you stole from the website using dev tools and figured out how to repurpose it for yourself. And sometimes you have an even less supported version of it, where you use Selenium to, you know, control the browser and have it do your login and grab your credentials from a secure store and get your MFA token from the phone link notifications and windows because your MFA token went to your banking app on your phone. And then that's how you get all your banking transactions downloaded for your budget. Sometimes that's the way you do things. IT is messy. It's not always perfect. And that's kind of what the talk was about is I just wanted to explore this idea of here. First and foremost, if you're new to PowerShell, here's all the amazing. here's all the amazing different ways you can use it to just glue stuff together. But also, if you're early in your journey, or even if you're not, and you're in IT and you're constantly chasing the perfect solution, depending on the environment, depending on the desired outcome, sometimes you don't need perfect. Sometimes you need workable. Sometimes you need good. Sometimes you can deal with something that breaks often, as long as your monitoring is good enough that you can actually know right away when something is off and get in there and fix it. Maybe you can set it up so that it's creating an event log entry every time a specific thing happens. And then a thing will run when it sees that event log and heal the problem that caused the event log in the first place. I don't know. Maybe you guys are smart enough to figure that out out there. So it was one of those things where I like to talk and I'll just keep talking until people tell me to stop. And so I thought, why not continue my journey here, share a little bit more with the PowerShell community that I have taken so much from, even just from this podcast. I've been listening to this podcast for a number of years. A lot of really intelligent, really great people on it, not just yourself, Andrew. And I've taken so much from them. And then you go to Summit and you meet these people. And they're just, they're our niche heroes for this niche part of the internet. But we respect the work. We respect the drive that's gone into it. And it's fun to meet them. And it's fun to nerd out with them. So it was just one of those things where I thought, okay, I can get up on stage, tell a few jokes, teach a few things. And I think everybody, myself included, will be better for it. So that's how we got where we are. Dang. I think you're right. I think you're right about that. And thanks for the kind words about the podcast. I'm glad it's there for you. I wanna just remind people, even if you're not able to make it to Summit, there are many opportunities to have your equivalent of lightning demos. RTP Sugg does lightning demos, sometimes PowerShell Wednesday, we do it. And even if that doesn't sound good to you, I'm always open. If you wanna get started in the community, don't know how to do it. Don't have any friends. I love holding your hand and guiding. You have a lot of history, seeing people take their first steps and lead to very awesome things because our community is just so good. I mean, that's the real secret. You just, once the person does the thing, it's really good. It's just getting past those internal barriers that we all have can sort of get in the way there. So shout out to the PowerShell community and shout out to everybody who's going to get started. Lucas, I have a question for you after we get back from this word from our sponsors. This is the PowerShell podcast. Hey, I'm Andrew Plot from the PowerShell podcast. And I wanna talk about something that makes IT life a whole lot easier, PDQ Connect. It's designed to get you up and running fast. It's straightforward and just makes sense. You can instantly see the state of your machines, patch with just a couple clicks and automate the jobs you don't wanna keep doing. It's easy, fast, and intuitive. And when a user calls with an issue, Remote Desktop lets you help them right away without hunting for tools or switching systems. If you want endpoint management that works as fast as you do, give the free trial a shot at pdq.com slash trial. PDQ Connect is simple, secure, and pretty damn quick. That's pdq.com slash trial. Give it a go. Now, back to the PowerShell podcast. I wanna ask you about Open Source, man. Where are you with Open Source? Do you have any projects? What's your goals in Open Source for this year? You know, it would be fantastic to contribute to something. I don't think I've ever contributed actually to a project. And, you know, I've even given people advice that I've gotten from, you know, smart people who have PowerShell podcasts or have been on a PowerShell podcast. And they say, you know, even just the documentation, even just, you know, something, you see a typo, you see an error, jump on that, contribute to it. I don't even think I've done that yet. So maybe that's a good goal for myself is to seek something out, get back to the community in that kind of way. And not always look at it as what can I put out there, what can I help that's already out there, you know? Yeah, no, I love that, dude. If you look at my contributions on GitHub lately, there's so many that I change one word on a small project and I am one of two contributors. But it's like, if you're going through the readme and you see one thing's a little bit off, it's so easy to submit a quick PR. I'm just like, eh, why not? I think the PR is a barrier to entry. You know, now that I've done a bunch in the last like year and a half, because my team was like, hey, we're doing config as code. So we're learning Git, we're doing the thing. It doesn't seem as scary. But maybe that's a great place to start with AI. Hey, I want to make this change, this specific change. And I want you to make them a change. But I want you to help walk me through the PR process, you know? That is a pretty good use. Because these are just such perennial questions that people have. It's kind of hard to go wrong with the basics of that. And Git, Git's another really great one. Git, GitHub, they kind of sort of go hand in hand. But you actually don't need to know Git to start taking advantage of contributing to GitHub. No. And even like me, you have, if you have Copilot, create a GitHub action for you that does a bunch of really awesome things. But then you've learned just before the podcast started that every single time it makes a change, all of a sudden you have these diverged histories and you're going to have a problem committing things. AI is going to help me solve that too. You know, these are the things where it's less scary because I can get myself, you know, the problem I always have with getting things done, like DIY around the house and stuff like that is like, I'm a computer geek by trade. So, you know, some of those things are not the places where I spend a lot of my time. But I always find myself in the middle of it where you've taken the piece of pipe out of the wall. So now you can't turn the water back on until you solve this problem, but you've run into a barrier. And it's like, oh, I'm going to need a dad now because I don't know how to solve this particular problem. In the technology world, I mean, especially with Git, you can get yourself into some hairy situations with it. AI is going to be your co-pilot. You know, it's going to help you kind of navigate that and get out of it. Interesting. Great. It can GitHub co-pilot you out of some rough situations. Yeah. I will just give a little plug. There's this thing called PowerShell Org, and it's a GitHub repository. It's actually an organization. It's community-run. Yours truly and some other great people like Gilbert. You might have heard of him, Gilbert Sanchez. And we adopt and we maintain open source PowerShell tools that would otherwise go unmaintained. You know, some people get busy, they move on with their lives. Lucas Allman. We're actually looking for some folks. We have Plaster and PS2Pin currently underneath our feather wings. You know, we want more projects. We want more contributors. That's right. Great projects. Perennial at this point. I think it's a cool thing that we're trying to push. So if anyone is interested in contributing with us, reach out to me or Gilbert, or check out the readme. There's probably, yeah, there's some good first issues and there's some help-wanted things you can click on in the readme. I'll have a link to GitHub.com slash PowerShell Org below. Open source. I mean, it's a good chance to build out that resume. And for me, it's kind of nice to have the PRs or like the issues to work on kind of scoped to me. I don't have to go searching. Got a couple of projects in my purview now, you know? Yep. Yeah, I think that's the thing sometimes is we see these things as being somewhat inaccessible. Like we are not there yet. We don't have the skill set yet. That's for the PowerShell heroes to do. I'm just down here. I'm doing one line at a time. It is what it is. But there are skill sets that go along with contributing to open source. Like we were talking about before, how creating a pull request, that can be a barrier to entry for a lot of folks. If you don't have a lot of Git experience and people say, okay, yeah, well, here's the contribution rules and how to contribute something to this, just submit a pull request and fork the repository. And already you're like, I know what a fork is, but I don't know how it helps me in this situation. And I think I'm missing some pieces of the puzzle. That can be daunting. That can make it feel like, okay, that's for the smart people. That's not for me, but you are the smart people. You just haven't realized it yet. And AI is one of those tools where it's here. It's not going away. And you can utilize it for yourself, for your learning journey, for figuring these things out, for getting yourself out of a hole when you get yourself in a hole. And I think these things, it's half mindset shift and it's half getting that boost, that knowledge, that co-pilot to go along with you. And so absolutely, I'm sitting here being a bit of a hypocrite because I'm not sure I've got a contribution to my name on anything open source, Andrew. And that's something I've thought about a lot and something that maybe I'll make that a goal to change this year is, even if it's something small, I'm gonna submit that pull request. And I know I'm a little less intimidated by Git now because I've been on a journey with it for the last year and a half. But if you're out there and Git is still a little scary, ask a friend, ask a member of the community to help walk you through it. Maybe find a member of the community who it's their project. It's their open source project. And you're like, I really want to contribute. I really want to help, but I'm scared of these things I don't know. Would you help me contribute to your project? And I'll bet you nine out of 10 times, nine out of 10 PowerShellers agree, they'll say yes. So give it a try. Lucas, sorry, mic cut out. You said you were gonna do your first pull request on a PowerShell Wednesday, live for the world to see. Is that what you said? Oh, sorry, did that not come through? Okay, I'm gonna do my first pull request. Yeah, let's do that, Andrew. I think that sounds like a good idea. There's no pressure, no pressure. We'll figure out something. But I would love to see more people get on that bandwagon. And hey, who better to lead them? Who better to model the example of like, hey, it's possible. We might stumble. We might get a couple things wrong. That's okay. Part of the learning process. We'd love to see it, Lucas. Lead by doing. You don't necessarily need to lead from the point of view of an expert. You can lead by showing people this is when you're just a newbie like me, this is how you can become less of a newbie. It's a scary process sometimes. I don't want to take away from anybody's feelings on the subject. I can walk on stage and stand in front of people and talk and it doesn't bother me. Other people are going to be significantly bothered by that. And I don't want to take away from these fears. They're legitimate fears. But we take these things one thing at a time and we lean on our community. And eventually we do a little bit better than we did yesterday. And Andrew, isn't that the goal? That is the goal. Guarantee you can do amazing things if you just start that journey, start that process. And it applies to PowerShell, applies to a lot of things. And it's way easier if you do not just have your own thoughts in your own head bouncing around, especially if you haven't successfully done that before and gotten that to be part of your life. Well, there's a lot of winners in this PowerShell community who you can learn from and become the best at your industry. Maybe you're a system engineer, maybe you're in security, networking, whatever it is, I can promise you if you go through the PowerShell journey, you're going to be doing some pretty fancy things that your peers may not be privy to quite yet. Absolutely. Be like Lucas. Be like Lucas. I'm not sure I can fully co-sign that, but if that works for you, then yeah, be like Lucas. It works for you, at least. Well, Lucas, I appreciate you joining me on the podcast today. Is there anything, any message for the people you want to give before we sign off? And by the way, I love the PowerShell podcast shirt. Just glorious, glorious. Oh, blazing. So what's your message for the people? Last thing you want to say? I think that one thing I like about this podcast is there's a big focus on the human side of this. There's a big focus on the mental health side of things. You are here and you want to be here. How do you get there in a healthy way? And I think that right now, I personally have been feeling just so overwhelmed by change in technology, by the introduction of AI, by feeling really left behind. And it's, you know, there might be somebody out there that says, okay, this guy was just on stage. Maybe I saw him do this talk or you're just hearing that this guy did a talk at Summit. And so he knows things. He's got some level of knowledge happening over here. But I think the truth is, we've all got different levels of knowledge in different areas. And it can be a very overwhelming thing in tech to try to keep up with all of the latest things. And now with AI accelerating things and, you know, whatever other buzzwords we're going to use, it's that much harder to keep up. It's that much scarier and it can make you feel like, you know, you're not doing enough. I want you to know every one of your PowerShell heroes, every one of those people at work that you admire, everyone that you see doing something that maybe you don't know enough about or that you want to be better at, they've got those feelings too. It doesn't matter who it is. They feel like, oh, you know, I've got this down pat, but there's something over there that I wish I was spending more time on. I wish I knew better. And those are universal and common feelings. So don't let those hold you back. Don't let those be thoughts that allow your brain to attack you. and tell you that you can't do things or that you shouldn't do things or that you should leave that to the Lucas Allman's and the Andrew Plaz of the world. Try to quiet those feelings as much as healthy and as possible and just feel the confidence in what you have already done and let that lead you forward into all of the things that you're going to do. You know, we're all very, very capable and we don't have to draw a line in the sand and say, until I've done this, you know, I haven't done enough or until I learn all these things, I'm not smart enough. It's always gonna be more to learn and the tools that are out now are making it that much easier to learn a little bit more as we go. But honestly, just have a little bit of confidence in the fact that you got here. And if you got here, you can keep going in the direction that you wanna go. That's pretty powerful. I think if they got to hear in the podcast, listening to you say that, I think for sure they're on a fantastic trajectory because most people are not invested enough in themselves or their career to do something like that. So, dang Lucas. Gems, gems. Well, thank you so much for joining me and thank you everybody out there for listening to us. If you're listening all the time and you're kind of part of that inner circle, as I call it, with Lucas, I mean, that's a pretty good company. Well, I appreciate it so much. Feel free to reach out to Lucas. Apparently he has a website. Oh, I might've forgotten it. What was that website? LucasAlvin.com. Oh, okay. Yes, yes, yes. Spelled just like you'd think. I'll have links to everything we talked about in the show notes below. You can like, comment, subscribe if you want. You can find me on socials, at Andrew Pawtek, clipping up parts of the show, sharing them, giggling all the way. My LinkedIn's been going really well lately, so shout out to everybody who's saying nice things on there. Algorithms are interesting things. Thank you for checking out the PowerShell podcast, everybody. Take care of yourself. Listen to what Lucas said. It is absolutely, a lot of these people who you see look like they're so comfortable, it didn't start like that. It was a long journey, and they didn't do it alone either, so. Hi, everybody. Take care of yourselves. Bye, Lucas. Thank you, my friend. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the PowerShell podcast. The PowerShell podcast is a PDQ production, making device management simple, secure, and pretty damn quick.
