Transcript
community. And now here's your host, Andrew Plaw. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the PowerShell podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Plaw. And I have a very exciting guest today, someone who I've known for quite a while. Returning guest, very active in the community, Jim Tyler, IT director, K-12 Niles School District. Did I say it right? Yep. Niles Community Schools. Yep. Heck yes. Well, welcome to the podcast, man. How have you been? Good. How are you? You know, just troubleshooting some audio stuff here and there, but you know, we're hanging in there. It seems like we got it figured out in the end. Eventually, you know, two tech guys. People don't know, you know, what goes into these episodes behind the scenes. We earned our keep today. So, but glad we got it working out and glad we could circle back. I can't believe it's been so long since we last talked. I'm feeling old based on that. It's been almost two years, right? I know. Yeah, that was crazy. I know wasn't it just last year? And it's like, no, that was a year before. Wild. Yeah. But you've been busy, man. You've been doing quite a bit in the past couple of years. Yep. Yep. I've got a lot of stuff going on. You know, in the last couple of years, presenting at Mades, we've talked about that before, the Michigan K-12 community. I'm also actually an elected official now. I'm treasurer of my school board at a different school district on top of working here. So new modules, more PowerShell content than before, but still just, you know, plugging away. You're an MVP now too. That's right. I am. I am a Microsoft MVP. Thank you. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's been an interesting journey getting to know other MVPs. I'm sure you can speak to that as well. It's fun. I definitely want to talk more about your approach to life because you are very involved in a lot of things. I think that personally, selfishly, I can stand to learn a lot from that, but I want to talk tech a little bit first. You know, a lot of people out there, they want to hear that. So we'll get to that. And then I'm very curious to hear your community approach and some of the really cool opportunities, even putting your tech skills to use outside of just PowerShell, right? You're using, creating something called TapSpeak to help kids with speech difficulties. I definitely want to talk about that, but let's start with a little zero trust. Is that sort of where your head's been out lately? I think you're going to a conference. By the time this goes live, you'll probably have already gone to it, but you're going to a conference for zero trust as well. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to ThreatLocker Zero Trust World Conference. It's in Orlando, Florida. I think it's March 4th through 6th. And I was invited there because I kind of helped them with a commercial, them and my senior technician, Robert Schuster here. We were in a commercial. We were really passionate about the product and zero trust implementation. And PowerShell was a big piece of that as well. And also limiting PowerShell with the ThreatLocker product as well, because it's a very useful tool for automation for us, but it's also an attack vector for everybody that you see payloads getting implemented through a variety of ways with PowerShell. And it's important that we figure out how to secure PowerShell as well as use it. So it's kind of interesting in K-12 environment. We use PowerShell a lot on the backend for automation. Primarily, I've talked about this before, identity management, but that one bad link that gets through that a teacher or another staff member clicks on, if you have a PowerShell, the PowerShell can execute as an administrator. It's a real threat risk. So we have implemented zero trust with what I would say is really good fidelity here in those community schools. And we talk about that in that ThreatLocker commercial that we did, but I use a module called Ghost not to get ahead of it, to limit protocols on our endpoints, to stop that lateral movement of threat actors. Actually, Spencer Alessi, another friend of the podcast, is going to be presenting down at Zero Trust World. So I'm looking forward to actually meeting him in person. Yeah, it's kind of near to me. And I won an Airbnb in Orlando from some charity silent auction thing, and I just got it. I bought it last year, but I finally got it. I gotta say, I have been thinking about putting those Airbnb days to good use at the same time. I don't know, no guarantees, but yeah, right around the corner from me. And shout out to Spencer. He's been just absolutely crushing it this year. Oh yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I mean, he was really the inspiration. I think the last time I was on the podcast, he was on, I think right after. And his podcast is what kind of kicked me off on that whole journey, kind of full circle, on thinking about Zero Trust and thinking about, you know, just assume breach and actually going and validating your network on, you know, originally just thinking Active Directory, Windows servers, locksmith, some of the good tools that he talked about in that podcast. He talked about ping castle. And so I went on that journey. I wound up presenting at the Michigan Association of Educational Data Systems on securing Active Directory with PowerShell and other tools. So from that, that was 24, I kind of built this whole philosophy afterwards. And we wound up adopting ThreatLocker kind of almost randomly, you know, I think we just heard about it and set up a sales call and saw that it was really good at locking down. So locking down our endpoints in particular, but really all endpoints, but by that, I mean our teacher laptops, right? So we're kind of unique because we have managed detection response on our teacher laptops and they are really limited in what they're able to do in terms of escalation. There's a thing called ring fencing with the ThreatLocker product. And I'm not, I don't work for ThreatLocker. I don't mean to like say it too much, but it is a really good Zero Trust tool. I also use my ghost module. My team is trained to use that when they're deploying endpoints to shut off RDP, shut off, we shut off ping, we shut off any type of network discovery and make sure the PowerShell execution is, you know, unrestricted. And there's a whole variety of protocols. If you go look at my, on my GitHub, github.com slash Jim R. Tyler slash ghost, you can see what ghost does with that. So those things in tandem and with the tools doing the audits that Spencer talked about, I think, you know, we get to a better point where we're at a much better place than we used to be. But, you know, security is, is not a destination. It's continually hardening your systems. We're never going to get to a point where we say we're secure. That goes for physical security, something that my department's responsible for in the district, thinking door security cameras. Now we're using artificial intelligence tools with our intercom system to identify people. We can flag people as a person of interest and actually get a text if they show up on a camera. Some pretty crazy stuff that, you know, really leverages the technology to help make schools more safe, both in terms of physical security, but going back to PowerShell and ThreatLocker Zero Trust, we don't trust people who walk up to the building. We don't trust emails that come in, right? You know, we, we do the tests all the time. I got to a point where it's, I'm not doing the tests as much anymore because we're just locking things down where, you know, we're capturing and emails before they come in, using various tools and not to give away my whole security platform, but I mean, like everybody's doing these kinds of things, or at least maybe has a roadmap to get there. So Ghost though, let's, cause that's pretty helpful. A lot of these things, I'm looking at the functions that you have and what they do. I've written a version of this, but never compiled it all into one to where it's a nice and easy little thing. It seems like this is totally focused on locking down your end points. Are you doing this proactively or reactively? We're doing it. We're doing it proactively. Just, just thinking about the potential of what a threat actor could do by moving laterally on a network. I'm sure you've heard it's almost cliche at this point, but you know, ransomware deployment protocol it's, it's the number one way that threat actors are moving around on a network, aside from PowerShell remoting, if that's unfortunately enabled on an endpoint where it shouldn't be. So it is, it is a very proactive thing where we're assuming breach. We're assuming what happens if a threat actor takes over the credentials of an end user on the machine. And the reality is on our end points that they really can't do much with ThreatLocker. When you go to launch PowerShell command prompt or other tools that they just don't even launch because there's a policy built in with that application control policy that stops it. Not only that, the, I would have to double check if the current version of ghost is on there. I randomized the RDP listening port to a port that I don't even know what it is. So were it to be re-enabled, it would be non-functional anyway. So there's other just little things like that, that I call it guerrilla tactics because it's an irregular tactic in a way. It's not just set it, forget it security where we're going in and thinking about what are they going to do once they're on our network or if they've taken over an endpoint. That is definitely a great approach. And it's cool to hear that you're using PowerShell to make that better and sharing the tools with the world, which is just a pattern that we love to see. And I think that it's the type of module too, where it's like, okay, maybe you're not in the point in your career or your job where you could actually implement this. That's fine. It's not your responsibility, whatever, but you can actually look at the code and learn a lot like looking at the code and understanding how things work in the background is so important, especially when it comes to security, where these things we're talking about might be the first time someone's ever heard about network-based attacks. Okay, maybe that's not the best example, but some of this stuff, it's going to be the first time they've heard about it. You look into the module, you find out what's going on behind the scenes and all of a sudden you're a little bit more informed. And I think that's really critical for security. You have to kind of know what's going on out there. You can't just wake up one day and have it all figured out. Yeah, absolutely. And if you do look at the code of that module, a lot of it was not you know, quote, vibe coded. I mean, we're all probably using AI tools at this point to, you know, vibe coding is such an interesting phrase to me because I'm like, oh, you just mean scripting? Like, to me, I've always just written scripts, used what tools I had available to be able to write the scripts. But not that I have a problem with it necessarily. I mean, you could write something entirely with, and I have actually, you know, we talked about Tapspeak, the iOS app. I'm not really a Swift programmer, but I can make an app based off of my designs and it's pretty incredible with cloud code. But yeah, if you look at that, I couldn't make that. I mean, I did try to initially make that, but I really had to kind of say, you know, go in and figure out what does it mean to disable some of those things? Because some of them are protocols, some of them are registry key changes to disable some of those things that are mentioned in Ghost. And you need test it to have true fidelity with it. And I go as far as not just testing that I've disabled it, but having my team deploy it, it's part of the process. And hey, what's the IP of that laptop, teacher laptop you're getting ready to deploy? Let's see if we can RDP or ping it or do anything to it. I want to talk about that a little bit. Can we go, because we talked about Tapspeak a couple of times. There's other things you've coded as well with, I think there's a bigger topic that we can summarize it all up with, but what is this Tapspeak thing? You said Swift, iOS app. Give us a little bit of a rundown. Yeah. So Tapspeak is an application for non-verbal students. In particular, I have a K-12 angle, but adults use these kinds of apps too. They're AAC apps, augmented assistive communication tools, or maybe it's assistive augmented. I can't remember. So look up AAC tools to see what those are exactly, but essentially this student has an iPad tablet typically, and they have other apps. Proloquo is one. There's a lot of paid apps. So they are tapping on the word to speak. So they tap on a, it's a, it's a grid of tiles and you tap on it and say, I want to eat apples. And these apps are actually tremendously expensive. So they're $300 on average. Some of them have subscriptions now, and I wanted to make a free version of it. You know, if you go to Tapspeak.org, you see that the question is, would you charge a child to speak? So there are literally students, there are kids that need these apps to be able to talk. And when they switch districts, they come in and maybe don't have the tool right away. A free tool fills that gap. And it fills that gap also just for younger kids who aren't even in schools that don't have access to speech pathologists yet. A lot of these kids wind up having to wait to, they're waiting on insurance claims or on whoever to be able to help them because insurance, a piece I think of why the apps are so expensive is because insurance pays for them. So you're going through a claims process to be able to get the tool to be able to speak. So a lot of them, there's actually signs that technology use at an It's just that their skills haven't been developed correctly because of kind of adverse technology. And the goal for a lot of them, and there's varying degrees of disabilities for people and for everyone, right? There's a whole spectrum of people that these tools serve, but the goal is for them to not to become verbal and eventually not use the tools for the ones that are able to. That is freaking awesome. First of all, I think it just represents so many good that I like to see and people and profess to them. But I want to understand a little bit more of the why, because did you, you're like, I know you're in K-12, you're in meetings, maybe this technology comes up and you realize that it's like a big thing, or is that kind of how it came across your plate as a potential area you could help the world be better in? Yeah. So, you know, it came across my plate originally too, because I didn't really know what it was. You know, somebody, a new student would come in, this is sort of the pattern. New student would come into the district and say, hey, I needed an $800 iPad and a $300 app. And you're kind of like, oh man, that's a lot of money. Why do you need that? And then I look at it and what I see is someone who hadn't talked to speech pathologists is that an app with kind of clip art looking pictures that you tap it and it plays a word, not understanding the whole breadth of research and what that is, what that means to the student. And I'm like, okay, what, you know, what is that? So originally as a challenge to myself and I got in way over my head, but I think the tool is way more viable now than it originally was. A challenge to myself, I was like, well, I bet I could make that and have kind of a free version that would function as it. Now there's a ton of science into the motor memory that happens while you're using that apps, those kinds of apps, like the tiles need to be in the same positions. So if you switch a grid, so you say I want, and then it switches to a want grid. If there's other words around that first grid, they need to be on the second grid in the same spot or else that it kind of builds that muscle memory for them or the motor memory for them to be able to. or the motor memory for them to be able to talk. So, I mean, I, so that was my initial thought because it does cost a lot of money for the school to be able to pay for that. We've, you know, we've spent thousands of dollars just this year on buying these apps. But then realizing that what it was, and, you know, I don't want to fault the companies because they put in time and research, but, you know, with the advantage of the modern LLM tools, AI tools, I felt like I could build something that was actually pretty comparable. And TapSpeak, I mean, I'll tout it when the iPhone app, the iPad app launches. It's got 17,000 words in the dictionary right now. I believe that beats any of the other paid apps at the moment. It's got predictive text. If you look on the side, it has a thesaurus. So you're tapping on a word, it's got predictive text and it's called the utterance bar. And then on the side, it's got kind of related words that would pop up. There's something called core versus fringe words, the more commonly spoken words. There's a dot in the corner. You'll see that in the web app. Some of the words have dots in the corner. That's a core word. So while speech pathologists are laying out the apps, they can, there's kind of a general rule that it should be 20, 80, I think. And it depends on who you talk to. A lot of this stuff is subjective. Kara Cotter, she's actually an assistive technology person at our county level education, the Barry and Risa. She's helped me out a lot with this. I actually talked to her for about two hours today, just be like, hey, what would this, you know, what are some kind of even more fringe use cases that we can do to implement into the app? One idea she had was that there's no way in a lot, I think any of the apps she said now for them to export to Google Docs. So if a child is using that to do an assignment, that's a great feature. And that's a feature I'm gonna roll out and tap speak. But the biggest thing for me is it's gonna be free and there's not gonna be less of a barrier for kids around the world. It's actually in multiple languages. You saw it's in 36 languages, which also beats any of the other paid versions of it. So I'm really hoping for it to be a quality thing that helps kids speak and adults too. That's awesome. And I love how you've taken, you know, you learn these tech skills, you know how to code here or there throughout your career, and you're able to kind of pivot and now create something that is not PowerShell. It's not related to Zero Trust or any of that other stuff and do good in the world. And I think you said you used some AI technologies to help you with this. I think that that is such an interesting and cool place. And when I see people do what you've done, which is you're making stuff, right? It is really helping you ship stuff that you would not ship otherwise. I think it's a really cool thing. Yeah, thanks. And actually there is a PowerShell component too, because the website, funnily enough, all roads lead back to PowerShell I find. So I started making that in December. You and I are talking right now in February. I made the initial prototype in a weekend. I went down a rabbit trail and generated the images. The images are actually, that's another thing that's kind of not great. There's companies that license those images in a lot of the major apps. So they're having to pay a license. Yeah, I know. Yeah, so there's just, everyone has got their hand in the pot the whole way down the thing. But I started, the web version of it is an Azure Static Web App that I made with PowerShell. So that's what kicked off the whole thing. PowerShell architected the web version of it. And then now I'm transporting those same JSON grids. And actually too, I couldn't make it all with AI. I tried to, like I said, with the ghost module, like I did. I'm like, man, it's not getting where I want it. The grid layout design is actually JSON files. And I had to kind of architect that myself. I tried three times that first week I was making it and I couldn't make it. And then once I had the grid architecture that would work, that would move from one grid to the other correctly, it really couldn't build it. It struggled. And I was banging my head against the wall trying to get, I was like, I need to lay it out for me. I did it on paper. Explained it to Claude is principally what I use. I do use GitHub Copilot. And from there I was able to architect the original app. But PowerShell kicked off the first version. It provisioned the Azure Static Web App that houses that website that you see. So props to for sure for Microsoft for that because Azure Static Web Apps are free. There's a premium tier. They're only nine bucks a month. They're actually great tool, like launcher tools in my opinion. That's what a bunch of my little side projects like that run on. Do you know of any students using it yet for TabSpot? So I posted on Facebook when I first made it and got some fanfare within my own personal network. There is somebody I know who said that they're actually using it, but we wanna, I kind of backed off from promoting it after talking to Kara, because once they get the, we need to make sure the motor memory pieces stay the same. And throughout development, some of that's changed. So that's gonna be an impact if a kid gets used to it too much and now their motor memory changes. It's recoverable. They switch tools sometimes, but I'm aware of a couple anecdotes of people using it, but once the iPad app launches, that'll be better because really on a captive device, the browser version's great for teachers to be able to map. So now they'll have a web based version. They could kind of point, that kind of thing. But they also, you don't wanna give a kid just a web browser. And that was a fair point. I was like, boy, I know that in principle. So we'll give the iPad app, it locks the screen, it goes full screen, locks it, and then you have Safari disabled on the iPad. So they're just using the communication tool. Okay, nice. That's very interesting. So by the motor memory, you mean like, so say someone's using it, they memorize how to say a certain sentence because the buttons are in the same spot. If you were to change the algorithm and the grids or whatever you were saying, that would change their motor muscle memory and it would kind of take some of the testing. Yeah, it'd make it slower for them to talk and they'd have to like kind of re-memorize the new layout. So yeah, we're developing it with intention. I shouldn't say, I am, Kara's advising on it. Kara said she would be involved as much as she can. She's actually a graduate professor at Andrews University or I think like an adjunct on top of her role. So she teaches this stuff. So great resource. We're gonna kind of keep piloting it, get it into some students' hands potentially this year with like an actual research study potentially or with other speech pathologists in the county and then just go from there, build the Android version, keep adding languages, doing more cool stuff with it. That's awesome. And in the same vein of like creating stuff that's a little bit outside the PowerShell space, you have this project, You Shall Not Pass. What is this, man? What's up? It's another K-12 problem. It's a Chrome extension that doesn't make students happy. It's kind of a different angle. So that blocks, it's kind of a heavy-handed Chrome extension that blocks games. It blocks Chrome exploits like Ultraviolet. What's the other one called? Rammerhead, I believe is what it's called. A couple other things and it uses DevNet request rules. Chrome extensions are really just JavaScript. I, it really, actually Cloud Code did the bulk of that one. I kind of had to tweak it a little bit, testing it. That's kind of the nice thing about being a director too. It's like, well, I have resources. I can test it with my staff and we spitball, have a conversation, so we piloted it here. So yeah, no, kids hate it because it blocks games and they, you should read the reviews on that extension on the Chrome web store. I get hate email now from kids around the country. I got one the other day from a kid in Arkansas expressing, I'm stifling his free speech. I'm just trying to create, get malware. Like some of those games sites are bad. We pay a lot of money for tools though. We pay like, we're required by federal law to have tools. If we get E-rate money from the Federal Communications Commission to pay for network switches and we have to have content filtering to be able to take that money. So that goes back to the laws made in the 1990s. So we have to filter, but no dis on, I feel like all I'm doing is dissing software companies, except for Microsoft. But the content filter companies, they have like a lag on solving these issues, blocking certain things. And one of the exploits, it also solves another exploit. It's sort of an exploit. It limits the number of tabs they can have open. So what they realized was the students would bookmark 200 things and then you could right click the folder and open all of them. It floods the memory of the Chromebook and then the extension fails to work and now they can do whatever they want. Once you get up to that 16th tab, it closes your first tab. And it's real simple JavaScript that does it. It's not anything too complex, but it's more about assisting with classroom management is really another piece of it on top of the filtering. Because we want to keep kids on task while they're in school and that I feel like you're not generalizing, but attention spans, other technologies over time have kind of reduced some students' abilities to do that. I would defer to all research studies on that, but I mean, anecdotally, it's what I hear. And yeah, so it helps solve that issue. And really the districts that have implemented it, including ours, you see like they basically can't get to games or break some things. They still do. One thing they do is Google Sites, they embed games in Google Sites. If you don't have other restrictions, they'll... Actually a student the other day I was presenting on AI to our graphics CT class, he made an HTML game. He's like, why can't I make HTML games in Cloud or chat GPT and download them now? And that's how I play them. Or he's like, he said he did it last year. And I'm like, well, we actually blocked the execution of HTML or the opening of HTML files from the Chromebook so you can no longer do that as well from your downloads folder. So it's a cat and mouse game. Also not a destination. That is very interesting. I've never thought of students being essentially internal threat actors to an extent. I don't think they're trying to break the law necessarily. They're just trying to do whatever else. But that is very interesting. And reading these reviews, oh my gosh, it might be the best thing ever. Because I heard a coworker reached out and said, hey, have you heard about Jim Tyler's Chrome extension? And I said, what? And I checked it out and I was like, oh, let's see the reviews. Wait, what? And I read them and a lot of them made no sense. Just dumb, not cool, Jim Tyler. I didn't pass my test, very bad. So many great ones. Check it out. I guess if you're in K-12, there's actually some practical uses for you there. Yeah, absolutely. I do in a way feel bad. They'll figure out a new way. You're encouraging them to increase their hacking skills, which I'm really curious how those like hacking methods disseminate. Like there has to be some kind of central, like these are the recently graduated kids who figured it out and now they're like, you know, doing some hacker stuff. They teach their little siblings and they pass it on. I don't know, it's interesting. Yeah, there's a couple of discords and subreddits. Actually, GoGuardian is one of the major content filters. If you look at the GoGuardian subreddit, it's half a dozen people. Half of it's kids talking about how to get around GoGuardian and sharing ideas. And the other half is like IT professionals trying to figure out how to configure GoGuardian correctly. So between those couple of things, I don't know, there's just like a community around it. Kind of like the PowerShell community, I guess. Yeah, there's that song, girls just wanna have fun. Kids just wanna get around the internet filters. You know, it tells all this time. My daughter said, I was kind of explaining some of it to her. She's 12, she's a seventh grader. And her response was, bro, just to get around, or bro, just to play games. That's right. Oh, that's hilarious. But it speaks to that thing of like, okay, you've learned how to code. Congratulations, you can do a lot of stuff in PowerShell. But those principles and the ability to kind of know what coding is, generally flow control, whatever, you're able to take that into new areas and do things like JavaScript, which is used for extensions. I've seen people do it for VS Code extensions, where like, oh, all of a sudden now, you don't need to learn TypeScript, I think it is. And real force multiplier there. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. That's kind of what I told the kids when I was presenting on AI the other day. I'm like, you know, there's a limit to what you can do. It's like, I could sit here and make an iOS app, tap speak, right now in its iteration is all local storage, it doesn't connect to anything. When you start thinking about connecting it to say a power school, that's like our student information systems that use all around the country. Now you need to start kind of knowing about API or security, you know, you need to know about database systems, you need to know about compliance laws. You know, FERPA, that's the big law that governs educational records. So COPA compliance for, you know, that's the kid under 13 kind of thing, you have to have parental consent. So once you start getting into the wider world of it, you know, you really, there's those things, the compliance things, and then there's, hey, do I even know what this is? You know, what am I connecting to? Is it secured correctly? You know, people are spinning up stuff with super base and I guarantee there's not correct database security on some of the things that's happening. And it's cool, we're all just out there playing around with the stuff, building tools that we think it's cool. It's really cool to see. Absolutely. Yeah, not everyone is able to do sort of your approach of like really actually ship things and go through things. But some people, oh my gosh, I think Adil, he was on here a few months ago. My gosh, he's pumping things out as well. It's very cool to see. It's kind of inspiring. I gotta say, I'm trying to look for some opportunities. I'm thinking about doing my own PowerShell extension. Oh, cool, yeah. Extension pack and VS code. I mean, it's probably, I don't know. No, we gotta let this ruminate in my head and figure out what it is. But there's opportunities. There's opportunities to help people. It's got to figure out what it is, you know? Yeah, yeah. You know, one thing I use for this in like even with TAPspeak, because there is like a robust community around everything. I'll use Gemini deep research, you know, the deep research prompt. And I'll say, hey, give me, look up the tribal knowledge is what they call it. Like the real like, you know, there's the certification test. And then there's the guy that lives DevOps, you know, and knows what it's like when something, you know, the right permissions are wrong on an S3 bucket and nobody, it's now it's locked forever or whatever that common issue is, you know. I'd be like, what's the tribal knowledge and then what of those problems could be solved? I don't know. I've done a lot of that with TAPspeak though. Like what makes sense for a 25 square grid based on the research? And it'll do a 20 page report with 600 sources. And it's like, this is what the research says. I don't know. I'm just throwing that out there. Yeah. It's interesting stuff. All right, Jim, I want to talk about your approach to life because you got something figured out. It's working for you. It's working for the world around you. But first a word from our sponsors. This is the PowerShell podcast. Hey, I'm Andrew Plot from the PowerShell podcast. You may know that I work at PDQ, but what you might not know is how much PDQ Connect can help you stay ahead of security risks. These days, keeping your endpoints patched and protected feels like a full-time job all by itself. Connect's vulnerability scanner gives you a clear view of what's vulnerable in your fleet, what needs to be updated and what should be fixed first. And when you're ready to patch, it's fast, like really fast. Let automations handle the repetitive stuff so you can focus on the real threats. And if your end users need help, you can jump in with remote desktop and get hands-on right away. Check it out for yourself. You can start a free trial at pdq.com slash trial. PDQ Connect, endpoint management that's simple, secure, and pretty damn quick. Now back to the PowerShell podcast. Oh, that was a lovely message from our sponsors. Thank you, PDQ. Jim. All right. So you're doing this stuff. You're incredibly busy. You're coaching sports teams. I think you said you're the treasurer, was it? On some other school districts that you don't even work for? Yeah, that's where I live in my hometown. Ah, okay. So a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Apparently you write PowerShell, which is awesome. And you're an IT director and you're in these other meetings, you're approving budgets. You got a lot of stuff going on. I'm trying to understand the why. Like, it seems like either you're completely selfless and only care about other people, or you've figured out a way to sort of make it so that taking care of your community and those around you makes you feel good. And it's kind of part of your life from what I'm seeing. Curious if you can give me some insight into that. Yeah. Yeah. No, I absolutely, totally believe in the community. You and I had talked about before when we were trying to get on, I always think it's a good benchmark when somebody asks like, Hey, why aren't you charging for this? I'm like, I kind of use that as a benchmark of kind of success. Like the tap speak. I mean, people ask me about that with, you shall not pass. That's got over, that's on over, I think, 400,000 Chromebooks now. So it's like, Oh, I could have charged a dollar a student for that. And I would have had 10 copies, maybe made $10. And, you know, like, or it could be out there and getting used. Yeah, in terms of that, you know, I kind of just keep going on stuff. I stay super organized with a family calendar. You look at those board meetings, serving on a public board, I would advise more people look into it or a planning commission. That's another thing. I'm chair of our city planning commission in Waterloo. And I do a lot of work with that. We're trying to get redevelopment readiness certification through the Michigan Economic Development Corporation. There's new ordinances that we're writing, actually using code to help with that. I think AI is a force multiplier. Like you said, I use it to help with sort of everything. I have a cloud project for that has the bylaws of or the ordinances of various organizations. And I can kind of get I have quicker access to information than I used to. But being on a board, I mean, a public board is is just a, you know, that's a couple meetings a month. It's not a huge strain on my on my time, but it's still really important. You know, there's a lot of this stuff seems like, oh, man, you're just approving. Yes, man approving type stuff. Until you have to choose a superintendent or go out for like, we recently did a $13 million construction bond. And it's like, well, that kind of matters who's making decisions on what that money gets spent on all of a sudden. So it'll seem really unimportant sometimes. And then it's like, hey, that two hour meeting a month is now deciding a lot of really big things impact a lot of people. It's crazy. But yeah, no, I mean, in terms of work, but life balance, it's tough. I've got two kids and a wife. And, you know, we we have home time in spite of all those things. And we kind of view the time the time I invest in youth sports is time I get to spend with my kids to ultimately. So, you know, it's something we're able to bond over basketball, baseball, or football, whatever it is. And, you know, then we extend that out to our family vacations, and we're going to basketball, baseball games, you know, and it's all just kind of a, you know, kind of just flows together. But I mean, honestly, I wake up and I see what's on the calendar for the day. And then I just go execute, you know, like, that's, that's kind of how I mean, I do. It's like, I've got a band concert. Yeah, yeah. I mean, like otherwise, but I'll say too, once you start doing stuff, people ask you to be doing more like what Jim Tyler says, yes, you know, so and he does an okay job with that baseball, whatever, you know, or whatever. So and that keeps going. So I've said no to things. People think I don't say no. And, you know, once my kids are out of this, though, long term, you know, I probably won't be involved as much of this stuff, you know, I'll see, I'll run for reelection in 28. And then maybe one more time after that, then when my son graduates, eventually, you know, I'll probably be done, you know, you just move on to a different, different chapter of your life. And I think that's something Don, Don was kind of talking about, too, you know, just the stages and his journey is like the arc of writing books, and then the MVP times. And now, you know, what he's what this is a word for, it's like the harmony of life, like right now, a lot of things are working your favor to be super involved in, you know, coaching sports and stuff like that. But as time goes on, it's maybe not going to like feed into your life system the same way. And it's totally fine to pivot. Same thing with Don probably came to realization, hey, this isn't really feeding me and the way I need to be fed as a human. So let's go a different direction and learn some new lessons and challenge ourselves in different ways. Yeah, which is really awesome. And I think you also speak to like what you're doing, hey, you do more stuff, more people ask you. That is what we see, I guess, in the board setting, but also any part of it. If you're putting yourself out there publicly at all, you're letting yourself be seen and saying, hey, I do things. I'm not just going to be afraid and in the corner by myself, I can take feedback, I can say things publicly, whatever the case may be. It's a real opportunity for everybody. And I think that pattern is present in all areas of life, not just the more volunteering side of things. Yeah, absolutely. You know, once you people see that you're a good faith actor and what you're trying to kind of make a system better or a process better, you know, and that's a really good point, too. I don't serve on these various boards to just have titles or whatever. Like, I'm trying to like accomplish things, you know, there's a goal. Like, I got involved, I was asked, you know, to consider an open spot on the school board because I was out campaigning, passing out flyers for the bond. They're like, wow, you're pretty motivated about this. I'm like, well, I want a safer, more secure school, you know, for my kids and everyone else's kids in my hometown. So it just kind of snowballs. It's the same thing. Like, if you automate something, it's like, well, geez, you know, you're able to solve this, automate this crazy thing with PowerShell that saves all this money and time. It's like, what other, you know, where else could we point you to to create more efficiencies in the organization? Yep. And I think, you know, you kind of spoke to it. You make your school better. That's a school where your kids go. I like that. You're a nice coworker. Hey, the people who you have to see every day are a little bit nicer. They're a little bit more able to do work. It makes the situation that you're in better. And it also helps other people. I love things that are just good from all angles. And it seems like you have a lot of that going on. It's maybe not as good if you wanted to be greedy and just make money. I think there's maybe some different angles you could take, but would you be as happy? Would you be as fulfilled or would you feel empty inside? I don't know. You know, that's to be determined by each of us. Right. But I do appreciate your approach to things. And I hope that other people can emulate that. I know that genuinely I look up to you in those ways. I'm trying to find my opportunities to volunteer more, especially as time goes on, you know, not rushing it. But, you know, if you are connected to the reality that your community affects your life so much, how could you not want to put time into it? Especially if, you know, we're like professionals here. We're spending a lot of time on certain skills. Might as well put it to good use because other people maybe aren't. And, you know, you can we all have our places where we can contribute, even if that's not being on the board here or there. It might just be being a really kind coworker. But I think it's just life is more fun when you are bought into that process and you get like the kind of back and forth feedback. It's just vibes are higher. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That's so good. I mean, it's a dial it back to, you know, just like what it means to be like a Microsoft MVP and a community contributor or like, you know, even the podcast, the impact you've had with this podcast is just immense. The amount of things that people have learned, the people that we've all like been cross exposed to. It's huge in a professional context. And that's that's really, you know, we're kind of could spill over. It's like, man, once you get grinding, you know, it's like, you know, you I mean, you go to a lot of conferences down and out speaking more and more here. Now I'm interacting with people in Europe and doing all these great things and it just snowballs. You know, it's really cool to see. Yeah. And I think something that I've noticed is early in my career, I would really overthink if I'm sending a message in a different channel that I've done before. I'm overthinking the heck out of it. I'm going to speak at some place for the first time. Oh, my whole day is thinking about just that. But you were talking about how busy you are. You wake up, you see your calendar and go. Do you feel like and I've kind of seen this in my life. I'm curious if it's true for you. But as you're so busy, you have to just kind of be yourself, be comfortable being yourself and live in the moment because you cannot stress out about every single important board meeting or important this or that, because ultimately it's just going to you got to just keep going. You can't harp on things for too long. Yeah. That is a really that's a key insight. And I think that makes a huge difference professionally and in volunteer roles, because it's like, like, hey, I can't I can't be upset about what happened at a basketball game. I can't be upset about someone who disagree with me because it's like I just need to have it makes you wind up having a clear head in a way to be able to make the decisions. It's like, here's the data. Here's the situation that I'm trying to deal with. You know, it could be, you know, I inadvertently get involved in discipline situations, you know, damage Chromebooks. It's like it's like, OK, that needs a resolution and we've got to move on. Like, I'm not going to have hurt feelings over a not great situation. But, you know, because I have to keep if I start dwelling on something, like everything else will kind of, you know, fall fall apart, but suffer as a result of it. So it's just go, go, go. Yeah. They just give a certain clarity. And I'll say the drawback to that is, you know, we've talked about Chris Thomas and mental health. It's harder for me to slow down even on holidays, like the Christmas break. Like I, you know, I get such in a routine, like even like I wake up usually between 5.05 and 5.15 every day. I don't even set an alarm and I have my morning routine that I do and, you know, just go until, you know, 9 or 10 at night. You know, if I get home late from something, there's normally something. If I get home early, I'm still grinding on things, you know, still house chores. You know, there's all the life you still have to do on top of these things. But yeah, it does make it harder to slow down once you get in that. But I feel that the trade-off is worth it because I'm able to get so much. It's organized time with the family and the work and the volunteer things, but it's well, well done time, you know? Yeah. Deliberate, not just accidental. Hey, we're sitting in the same house, hanging out, doing something. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think it also highlights because, you know, being on the other side of the coin where there have been people, I think Don Jones was a great example very early on in my career. When you're in the spot that you're in, Jim, there's probably people that work for you that look to you for validation. So, there are times when you're in a rush and you have to send a message. You know, you can't think about the 20 different ways people could interpret. You got to send a message. I mean, I'm not saying it's rude, but people can read into things sometimes because they don't have that understanding that you have stuff to do. You can't always spend a ton of time making language really gentle. Not saying we're trying to be rude out here, but I'm just encouraging people that, hey, if you get someone else that you're working with, you look up to technically or as a leader and you see a message that kind of strikes you the wrong way, don't harp on it too much and think that it's the end of the world and the person hates you because I've been in that boat. It's absolutely not the case. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you don't want communication to suffer. So, yeah, I've been through that, you know, where I had it asking about baseball schedules and it's like, I'm just going to screenshot it and send it to you. And, you know, if you could take that as like a negative thing, you know, I'm just passively, you know, saying whatever. It's like, no, it's like, it's just in the sake of efficiency, you have the information you need now. I'm not going to flower up the language with it, you know? The other thing is too, I mean, you know, once you've, you know, I don't mean this to sound conceited, but it's like people start to assume you're just going to do things right. And it's like, Hey man, I'm still human. I could buy a bad product that doesn't roll out well. You know, I've not done everything perfectly here at work. I'm willing to own it. You know, there's, there's systems that rolled out smooth and there's some, some that don't because there's something you can't foresee. I mean, I've got about a million different systems inside of a school. When you think about it, it's crazy. The door system, the camera system, the food system, the library card system, the you know, we have a MDM for our VR headsets, you know, that could be rolled out wrong. Like, you know, it's just, there's like a million different things. You know, this, I'm actually sitting in the podcast studio for the, for the high school. There's all specialized software and equipment in here that needs to be set up correctly. And we're always just trying to follow through to make sure everybody's getting value out of the, of the out of the technology or whatever it is technology. you're supporting or doing. Yeah, it makes me appreciate when people reach out and they include all the context in one message. They make it easy. I found that that approach early on in my career was I was trying to make some connections to people for the first time and just tap into their mindset a little bit. I had a lot more success when I gave people the full message, the request, where I'm coming from, ba-da-boom, all of it in one compared to just like, hey, good to meet you, da-da-da-da-da. It's just harder to do that back and forth. So people out there, do not be afraid to reach out to folks that you look up to. Maybe even Jim, you're on the podcast today, but just maybe make your communication a little succinct when you can, if you actually want a response. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think that's such a really good point too. I've had people reach out, like, hey man, I watched your PowerShell videos. My big one is learn PowerShell in less than two hours. I should do an updated one. I hear that critique. It was PowerShell 5 with ISE. So I said, yeah, I should probably do a 7 with VS Code. I get it. But when you hear those, I got a message from a guy in Egypt who was just doing a little PowerShell series. And he's like, hey, I responded. I actually responded. He said, I can't believe you responded, but it was a message to your point. And I was like, yeah, he's like, that's so cool because I learned PowerShell from your video. So it's just really, it's wild. It's wild to hear that stuff, but it's just, that's why I like sharing stuff for free because it just helps. Yeah, you never know what kind of cool things can come from it. Even if it's just one, like, oh, wow, you helped somebody. I mean, just all you did was help somebody in Egypt. That's really cool and out of scope for so many people in jobs out there. It's like, you're gonna help somebody across the world. How? How would that happen? But you can do it if you put yourself out there. And in IT, we're kind of fortunate. There's this kind of global ecosystem for technology. Yeah, I'm real passionate about that too. I mentioned tap speak earlier in different languages. If you look at like the disk cleaner script and the ghost script, I have those actually, those repositories in different languages with native language readmes because it's so easy to do now with AI tools. And I think it's, we really can just utilize these tools to be a truly global contributor now in a way we couldn't before. It's so cool. Oh yeah. It's gonna be interesting to see these things continue to play out. Because I wonder when the tool side will switch to the consumer, to where, you know, we just have one language and then the AI, whichever is most friendly for the AI and it takes it and then it translate it locally and, you know, adds tone, whatever you choose, that kind of thing. But I wanna talk about a couple other things because there's been some changes in your life. We're talking about learn PowerShell. I mean, I'm talking to the PowerShell engineer on YouTube, but is there a new title? What's going on, Jim? Yeah, well, so I did change my YouTube handle from PowerShell engineer to Jim R. Tyler. You know, I, and some of that in prep is, I plan to post some tap speak videos and be posting about my other projects. I'm certainly not done with PowerShell. You know, I do the PowerShell newsletter every Friday on Substack, but I just wanted to not pigeonhole my channel as much, even though PowerShell built it. Those videos actually still get plenty of views. It did hurt algorithm wise. I was kind of surprised by that, but took the risk. But yeah, I mean, I am involved in other things I'd like to talk about on there. And I think, you know, as I keep going down this assistive technology path of making those kinds of tools. And also I've recently made some videos on shorts on SC-900. That exam, I passed that one last year. You know, I think it's good to just go back and, I like certification tests. You know, the lower hanging ones are easy. I shouldn't say that they're all important, but you know, those 900 level ones are easier to get and still important to just kind of validate that you know the systems you're working with, you know. So at least on a fundamental level. Yeah, right. It's like, people say I'm good at this. Can I even pass the 900 exam? You know, I don't know. I was like, I did. But then I, you know, I turned around full disclosure. I tried to take the 300 and failed it. And I plan to come back to that this year when I quote have time. But, you know, just I've got the book and it's like, those exams are hard. And, but yeah, I don't know. I think it's okay. I feel like if I didn't have powershell.news I wouldn't have done that because it's, because that was kind of my flagship thing. And then there was the book I wrote too. It was originally, you know, it was like a 400 page powershell for systems engineers. It's on Amazon. I'm not trying to peddle it or whatever. I don't think it makes sense. Yeah, yeah. It's good. It's powershell five. It was a good book. I had started writing it in 20, when did chat GPT come out? 22, like the big kind of public release. Yeah. So that came out, but I had like a little pivot where I talk about how to use, it was so bad. It was so bad at powershell back then though. It's still not great. Even, even Claude Opus is not great. In my opinion, like totally a powershell. It's like, I can't always make a one-off script that works right away. You have to kind of know, like it's just, so anyway. It opens it up a lot. Yeah. But yeah, I'm broadening my horizons slightly, but I am involved in a lot of different things. And I think Tapspeak is going to be, you know, kind of a big thing I pivot on and put some more energy to, I mean. Yeah. Sounds awesome. I imagine as you go through it, you might find other opportunities in that space. Cause I'm sure as you go through it, you might make more connections. Sounds like, I don't remember her name, but whoever it was is killing it. Type of person where it's like iron sharpens iron. You know, you're busy. You're doing all this stuff, contributing, making the world better. Sounds like she is as well. A lot of irons and different fires and ultimately benefiting the world around us, which I love. It's very cool. Yeah. Yeah. Good stuff. Yeah. All right. Fantastic episode so far. Is there anything else you want to plug before I ask you one question that I really need to know the answer to? Oh, geez. No. Well, yeah. I'll just say hi to my beautiful wife, Jessica, my kids, Addie and Preston. That's not a plug, but. Give them a shout out. Heck yes. I'll give them a shout out. All right. And I'll have links to all your stuff in the show notes, including your new YouTube channel. All right. A lot of people here in life. How do you make time to do power? You're a busy guy. I don't think that writing PowerShell probably falls underneath your immediate job requirements, if I had to guess. How do you make time? And I want to know just like practically from a high level, but also like in your day to day. If you know you want to write this script or this ghost project, whatever, are you marking time? Like, hey, it's going to take two hours today. Let me know how that process works for you. Yeah. So that's a great question. And you know, that's where it gets a little gray with my job, right? Like I use ghost. Like we deploy it on our machines. So I feel comfortable. And I would think my boss, Dr. Birtsfield, the superintendent here would also feel comfortable with me writing a security script. In fact, I know he does at work. So when I don't have meetings, you know, and you know, I've got lots of really dialed in systems of, you know, I have a department meeting every two weeks. I have one-on-ones with my staff members every other week. So we have one-on-one week and then we have a staff meeting and I don't micromanage and we have a ticket system and we use Kanban for our projects to really kind of dice up our time and track everything that needs to be done in the district. So once you have these good systems in place, it is easier to carve out time, depending on the time of the year, right? I think, you know, for me, baseball season's real busy coaching that. So once April, May comes, it's like my kids are both on travel, baseball and softball teams. We've got something like 14 tournaments between March and June. Yeah, that's a lot of weekends that are gone. But you know, like those coding projects, I say, make the case to your boss of what the value is you're gonna add to the organization. And I tell that to students when I present to them, you know, it sounds somewhat heartless, but you know, find what's your value gonna be in the economy and thinking about how you're gonna leverage your skills to outshine other people. I mean, at the end of the day, it's still a competitive landscape. You know, we can be as altruistic as we want and that's great, but you know, you do have to sharpen your skills, you know, way of the master. It's important stuff. So making that case to management that what you're doing, and then once you build that trust, then you get the runway to do it. And I've done, you know, so many changes and good upgrades. I think, you know, in my job that I'm trusted to be able to, hey, yeah, let's, you wanna work on TAP speak even, you know, it's like, that's for kids. You know, what's our mission ultimately at a public school. Right? That's a pretty insightful stuff. And I think everyone out there, a lot of people are learning PowerShell this year, Jim. I'm excited to see it. I know, I see that. I see that. Oh my gosh, I'm loving it. It's very cool to see. And I think part of that is absolutely, you gotta make sure that those around you are on the same page of like, hey, I'm going to be learning these automation skills. I want to make things better. Part of that is gonna be dedicating time to it. So I love it if people can have paid time to work on PowerShell every day, but it's gonna be harder to put that calendar event on if your boss has never heard about it. But it's quite likely if you have the conversation, your boss might be on the same page and encourage you. Who knows? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think something, I didn't talk to you about this ahead of time, but something fun that I've been doing, and you'll see it, like the reason, a piece of the reason my PowerShell video is so fun is it had Pokemon and Star Wars references. And I actually was using Claude to make one for Azure and one for AWS. Like, hey, let's build a Pokedex in AWS, but teach it to this DevOps exam, the certification. There's creative ways you could come up with your own learning paths. And it's more fun because it's like, okay, now I'm using PokeAPI to build a Pokedex, which really is a good cloud application because it's got a database and it's got calls and you're using storage, compute, everything you could think of. And it can also come up with ideas. So to maybe make it not so boring, like, oh, I'm gonna study for the SC300. I had it scaffold one that was like, hey, I wanna make the archives at the Jedi temple, make me a Star Wars themed study plan. And it did it, and I started working through it. I'm like, oh, this is kind of like a little bit more fun than like making a bank or whatever, or a credit unit. Like, so I think there's other creative ways to learn and motivate yourself and get that time on, and you feel more compelled to put that time on, on off hours. I mean, that's why I was kind of so motivated to make that first video, because I just had the idea. I saw one for Python. I was like, what if there was like a fun one for PowerShell? And that kind of kicked off the YouTube channel before I betrayed it and changed the name. But. You never know what tomorrow holds, right? And sometimes that involves a little bit of change. I think we learned that from Don Jones himself, right? He modeled that quite well, right? So. Yeah, absolutely. Awesome, Jim, I gotta let you go. You got some practices or something going on. Yeah, travel baseball and then a band concert. Oh man, busy night, double booked. Hopefully you get some food in there somewhere, but thank you, Jim, for joining us on the PowerShell podcast. Links to all your stuff will be in the show notes. PowerShell.news, hey yo, subscribe. It's been a great episode. Check us out on the PDQ discord, discord.gg slash PDQ. We got a Learn PowerShell dedicated channel. Beginner questions always welcome. We're trying to cater. If you're a beginner out there, please reach out to me. I'd love to hear your perspective. You can send it to me in a DM, whatever. Happy to talk about that. Jim, until next time, my man. We gotta tap in. Maybe we'll play another one in six to eight months because I'm curious to see an update on some of these things, some of the irons in the fire that you have. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Thanks so much you do for the community. It's really impressive and great work building up a lot of people around you. Thanks, man. My pleasure. I had a great time talking to you today, so. Yeah. Always awesome. We've got a great community here. Thank you, everybody. Until next time. Yep, bye. See ya. Thanks for listening to the PowerShell podcast. The PowerShell podcast is a PDQ production making device management simple, secure, and pretty damn quick.
