Transcript
community. And now here's your host, Andrew Plaw. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the PowerShell podcast. It's another week. We're here with another person on their PowerShell journey. Low-key crushing it, maybe high-key crushing it. Check on YouTube dot com slash PDQ to check out the PowerShell Wednesday presentation of our very own Mason Moserk. Awesome. Hey, Mason, how are you doing? I am good. Thanks. Thanks for the good intro. Oh, man. You know, I didn't give you much warning. We're going to go live. I just, you were feeling the vibes. I was feeling the vibes. We got to just hit record sometimes. Sometimes in life, it's that time when you just got to do it Nike style, you know? Yeah. Yeah. We had a deadline. We told everyone when to expect us. So we had to get up and That's right, man. Let's get to know you a little bit because you're someone who I've seen around for a little bit. You know, we've talked here and there in the PDQ Discord and PowerShell scripting channel. Hey, hey, Discord dot gg slash PDQ. But we haven't, you know, formally met. Our first time talking was actually earlier today at PowerShell Wednesday. What are you? Who are you? Where are you from? What's going on? Why do you talk about PowerShell? What is this thing? Yeah. Obviously, you know, my name's Mason. I work in security. I live in Oklahoma. Great place to live. And if anyone else in the PowerShell community in this specific one too lives in Oklahoma, like let me know. And because I have no idea. And my PowerShell journey began when I started in security and I was handed the best book of all time. Well, maybe, maybe not, but PowerShell in a month of lunches and it was fantastic, a fantastic resource. And I kind of took off from there, started slower and picked it back up after a year. And there's a lot of deep diving and tool making. And I saw the end of the tunnel and it's a beautiful thing. Let's hear about that a little bit. OK, so you're you're on your IT career, having a good time. You finished up school at that point, right? So you'd graduated, you're getting an IT. You have a little bit of background already. I think you were telling me earlier, done a little bit of programming and it kind of clicked with you a little bit. But then you're in this job, making that money, getting that paper, and you run into a coworker, gives you like PowerShell in a month of lunches, right? Is that how it went down? Yeah, actually, one of the managers inside of our group gave me that book and was like, this is an amazing book if you want to learn PowerShell and you should learn PowerShell. Like I know you have C-sharp background. Why don't you take this and see how it goes? Read one chapter a month. And that's what I did. You did a chapter a month. That's a smart way to do it. Because I feel like a lesson a day can be really intense if you're not very familiar with a lot of these concepts. So nothing wrong with taking your time to work through it because you get a pretty decent PowerShell by like the third or fourth or fifth chapter. You can really get a lot done. Yeah, you can. If you learn the right way, like slowly and take it in and work on it little by little, you can get into it pretty quick. I also want to shout out the Microsoft Jumpstart videos. Classic with Jeffrey Snover and Hicks. That should be studied. They put it together in such a great way that's both entertaining and informative and gives you something that's super valuable right away. Yeah. The Helmick Snover series was just so legendary. And I think it's re-uploaded by some other channel now. It has like over a million views. So definitely people have been influenced by that course. I'll give you more chance to talk. But one thing I really liked about that course is how honest they were. Like we did a presentation. You did a presentation earlier today at PowerShell Wednesday. Things don't always go to plan. You run into errors. And they were very much embracing that when they were live, which reassures people who are learning these confusing things for the first time. Yeah. It shows that everyone has to troubleshoot a little bit. But if you kind of learn how to do it, take it in and take a breath, look at maybe that error, that stupid red error, you might be able to identify the problem pretty quickly. Yeah. What year was this? Oh, sorry. Oh, it's okay. Sorry. I was finished, but... How did you get into PowerShell? Like you got the book, you spend a year on it, and then you're like into it. When is that? 2020, sometime in 2021, in the middle of 2021. And then I took it and I had done some scripting and kind of like supported a script that somebody else had built at one point. And I didn't really get really into it because I was kind of focused on the beginning of my career, and then really got into it later and got into a whole bunch of other stuff that was really awesome. So... Sweet. So, I mean, that's kind of a cool little journey. You get into it, you dabble, you learn some stuff, you kind of... Newer in your career, you're pivoting, you're learning some other tools, and then you kind of come back. And because you've already spent the time investing in it, you can start from a much further along place. It's way less daunting to get to where you're trying to go. Does that sound about reasonable? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you just... Don't feel bad if you start your PowerShell journey, and then you fall off. Life happens. You get busy with other stuff. There's so much stuff in IT to learn. It's okay. Take it step by step. Or if you need some extra motivation, go get some help. Just ask someone to teach you one thing. Kind of specific and see... Maybe someone just helps you get PowerShell 7 set up because there's just a lot of quality of life things that comes with it. That's a good way to kind of get back into it, I think, if you get in a place where you're stuck. Yeah. And I think if you're trying to learn something new like VS Code, that's another great chance when you need to reach out to other people because they've done it, they ran into it. You can save yourself such an incredible amount of time by just having anyone else in your corner, anyone else to share feedback with. It's just so helpful. Yeah. And you're right. I mean, talking about on the podcast about the community and what... And PowerShell specifically, how they deal with newcomers and different things like that. Very welcoming community. And as long as you're just honest with where you're at, and you put in a little bit of effort and not just ask for the answer all the time, yeah, you'll get really good results and probably a lot of good help. I feel like the type of person who'd be listening to this podcast is not necessarily the type who's going to be like, answer this homework question I have without any context. I think because if you're listening to this, you're clearly investing in your PowerShell journey you've heard about. There's some kind of reason that you're seeking extra resources. So I just think it's so great though to see the journey that you're on. Take me back a little bit because you learned PowerShell, but then there's this community aspect because there's a lot of people, millions of people watch that Jeffrey Snover course. A lot of people can write PowerShell. A lot fewer take it to the next level where they sort of get engaged in the community. When did that kind of... Why would you think about doing anything public? What happened there? You know, honestly, I'd be a little vulnerable and probably just say a little bit of insecurity in putting something out public with your name on it. Even though we want to push people to do that, it can be pretty daunting and you have to be able to accept critical feedback. And some people aren't going to be nice. Most people will be. This is a good community, I think. But I mean, it just took me a while. I wanted to be in a good place and I was building a lot at work. So I couldn't publish a lot of stuff. And I let my skills grow in there. And I still felt a part of the community. I occasionally ask a question in the Discord. And I listened to the podcast a lot. And as a beginner, not knowing what things to learn about without having to go back and re-watch a video or whatever, you guys on the podcast would give me ideas just listening to back home from work or whatever. And I think you just do a good job, Andrew. And I think it's a pretty enjoyable podcast for scripting, something around scripting. If you use PowerShell or know what it is, it might be. If you don't, good luck. But I appreciate hearing that because that's sort of what I'm trying to do with the podcast. There's a few things, but one of them is back in that journey, because the grind to learn all these skills, it can take years. And you get better as you go and you get some wins, but to get where you're trying to go, it can take years. And it can be easy to get discouraged, especially if you don't have anyone else around you encouraging you. And so a lot of it, it's like, okay, you're on this long-term grind. You're not going to learn everything we talk about every week, but you can hear our enthusiasm. You can hear how we're engaged and how the person who I'm talking to who has spent all this time on X, Y, and Z, it's brought them so much. So your brain can keep reminding you that, hey, these hard things that we have to learn in life and in IT, they actually do pay off eventually. And now I've been doing the podcast long enough. I have seen it time and time again with people from being where you are right now. Well, maybe even before where you are right now, but seeing them go through that journey. And it is a tale as old as time. If you put yourself out there, if you really are trying to learn things, you will be embraced. There will be great things to follow. So kudos to you for sort of showing others that that's a great approach. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. And you're never, there's always imposter syndrome and you just kind of have to accept it and it never goes away. I felt it today presenting. I mean, it never goes away. So you just kind of have to get used to it. Yeah. It's definitely a challenge. I had some thoughts. I see Gilbert typing and I'm like, oh, Gilbert's here. Yeah. He's definitely, he's just so advanced at this kind of stuff. But I also know Gilbert's awesome. And he wants other people to know about this stuff that he's awesome at, because how fun is it to just do something really cool all by yourself, you know, over trying to get on that leaderboard. We're trying to play popular games when we can, you know, the cloud's a little bit better. So sharing these cool tools with other people, just, it sort of elevates him a little bit. Just that community vibe, you know, shout out to Gilbert. He got some, he's got some cool little tools up his sleeve at all times, but I want to pivot. So we got this community involvement today. When did you decide you're like, hey, I'm going to start doing talks or trying to do things publicly? Cause I reached out to you, I think this week I had someone cancel last minute on PowerShell Wednesday. I reached out and asked if people wanted to do it. I think you suggested VIM. When did this idea of speaking and getting more engaged publicly start coming into your head? Uh, well, as I said, I work in security. I don't know if I covered this before, or we talked about it earlier, but in security, you kind of make a decision if you want to network and be more public, or if you want to be private, because you just know about everything on the internet and how scary it can be. But also like, you know, you either accept a little bit of publicity or you don't. And I was trying to decide between the two. And I think I want to lean into a little bit more public. I think I have the skillset and I think I enjoy it. And so that helped. And also I reached out after asking a couple of questions in the discord and I talked to Fred at one point and I talked to Jake. Jake Hildreth. I don't want to butcher his name. Uh, yeah. And they were super, super kind and answered a lot of great questions and we were just super enthusiastic in the chat. And, um, yeah, I think it's, and then I saw the other day, like you needed somebody. I said, well, now or never, I guess I can do it. And I'd already talked about VIM and it seemed like, you know, that hadn't been covered before and, or talked about and as much. And so I said, great. I'd be good for that. Let's do it. Did it feel scary though? Or were you just like, ah, it's going to be totally fine. Oh yeah. I was, I also not an easy first topic. I'm not going to lie. Like it was difficult. And so I, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the best way to put it together. And I, I still, I think I did okay, but there's definitely ways to improve on it. Having less than 24 hours too, it was a little scary, but I mean, yeah. I mean, I think you're like, you helped me a lot, Andrew. So that's like props to you. That's you get credit. I learned a lot. That's all I did. I was just learning out there, you know, and I actually did learn VIM to a certain degree. It's the type of thing you do need muscle memory and I'll have to spend more time on it. But I think I was following along. I was sort of intuiting a few things as I was dabbling here and there. And it's pretty incredibly powerful. Uh, I guess I want to more about the community stuff, but I think we're talking about VIM. We should give people a general overview. What is this VIM thing? Is this a crazy hacker thing? Do you have to be like level 9,000 hacker to do this or is it regular people's stuff? It's a text editor from 1976 and it's a text editor where you are not required to have a mouse at all. Boom. Uh, and you can use it on any computer and it's usually there by default. Double boom, you know, like crazy. Um, so that's how powerful it is. And it's just like you can do so much with it. The, it's like its own, it's got its own language, you know, its own configurations and profiles and plugins. You can make it your own, like you can basically turn it into VS code and IDE, but in the terminal and without using mouse. So, I mean, it's as complicated as you want it to be, but you know, if you learn the basics that can also be pretty rewarding just out of the box. Yeah, absolutely. And it's, there's such a high ceiling on what you can do. I'll tell people, check out the PowerShell Wednesday recording, but in general, this applies to any kind of hotkeys. Anytime you are not taking your hands off the keyboard, you are benefiting majorly. You have to be at the point where, you know, at least some to navigate without having to touch the mouse at all times. Uh, you're just going to benefit so much throughout the course of your career. And Vim is definitely an opportunity to do that. I'll say that though, Vim is just like anything else where you're going to have to invest time and effort. Maybe not the most in the world. Maybe you're like still learning Git and things like that. You don't want to, that's totally fine, but you need to know that in the back of your mind, but you need to know in the back of your head when we can we should learn hotkeys and if we really want to double down Vim is a great option. Yeah and that is like the other thing is because it's been around forever it's built in like a lot of developers have built in kind of like easter egg shortcuts and a lot of tools and it becomes this like really beautiful relationship to me at least with me and tech and I think any Vim user will get super enthusiastic in describing that in kind of the same way. It is like you know teach their own and if you want to start off small with shortcuts I think just making a list that you can organize and reference whatever you need like sometimes you need that just to get the practice when you have the time. Yep Tara was talking about how she's making all of her note cards and hey sometimes spending the time to go through things is absolutely worth it. Okay so you had to do that presentation and you finished it about an hour ago. How are you feeling now? You know you went through that process, you put it all together, you did it live, we had to start late, there was AV issues and then there was some VS Code live share issues, but you made it through the other through 10. How are you feeling? Like 10 good or 10 bad? I think 10 good. I'm feeling like a 9. I'm feeling pretty good. Why? Like I don't let you know how it went affect my mood. I think I did good. I explained the topic and like there were things I could change or would want to change but I'm not upset about it. If I had to redo it I would do it different but man first time so this is what it is. And that's the thing if it's your last time then okay that's as good as it's gonna get. If you know that you're not done well guess what it doesn't matter if this one was good just matters that you do the next one and learn from it. You know judging it is less important as long as you didn't do absolutely awful because we got that that long term you know we're in that marathon not a sprint kind of vibe this year and I love to see it Mason and you have such a cool name too so everybody you know this is Mason Moser welcome to the PowerShell community officially you should definitely well I guess you don't have any social media at this point but you are on the PDQ discord and PowerShell scripting channel people should absolutely say what up because I think that genuinely you have a lot to offer but you have something that you know I'd encourage people not to compare themselves to you because I think you are pretty advanced in some ways like your willingness to join something like that to me it indicates either you're pretty comfortable socially or you're pretty committed to your career and your growth which isn't that common I think maybe for other people it's harder for them to say yes but your willingness to share the way that you've embraced your career and grown there's a lot that I think is going to be happening in your future and I think part of that is empowered by you have a pretty solid foundation going into it so if there's people who maybe don't have that make sure you're definitely not comparing yourself to others as a general rule overall but I think sometimes there's people who should really just because they're a beginner you shouldn't do it whenever I got started there was a guy who was like a DBA and like oh I just started posting about PowerShell so did he and I see he does way more he's like taking off like crazy well it turns out he's had a lot of experience with other things and the sequel way of writing code and you know it is what it is if I were to get obsessed over that I wouldn't make any progress so that's a long-winded way of saying Mason rocks and you out there rock too but just don't make the future a little bit here what is your long-term goal are you trying to be a security forever are you trying to do you know are you just having fun learning right now yeah I initially in my draft the slides that I had in our the presentation today I had an intro slide I was like nobody cares you know like let's just get to the meat and I took it out but I'm a jack of all trades type of person and security is kind of that way and tech is kind of that way so I feel like that's how I ended up here is just having a lot of broad interests and so I really like being in security and I like being able to toy and play with a lot of things and really get into the nitty-gritty so I guess I probably will stay here but I said before I have a c-sharp background just a little um I did program a gooey application in college and it took many hours but I did it and I'll say like PowerShell is just as advanced as anything else out there there's almost nothing you can't do with it and so it'll probably be a part of my career going forward forever heck yes and that's what I like about a lot of the people who end up learning PowerShell to a decent with the community is they are almost always pretty security aware and they might not all have security job titles but if they're a developer they're very aware of uh healthy coding practices and if they're in some other field you know they just are aware of security in a different way and I think that's the benefit of being tied to any community that's sort of modern and keeping up with things and has people in different industries is you get to understand these best practices because ultimately and I say this a lot security is everyone's responsibility even if your job doesn't have like security engineer in it if you're in IT or even not IT right you click a bad link in your email you kind of can cause some damage we all have a role to play especially those in IT though you know because we can we can turn those levers we can make it happen and that can all be empowered by automating things with PowerShell oh my gosh Mason it's too good it's too good yeah and to to kind of lay on top of that I mean what you said earlier about not comparing yourself to others it's the same thing when you talk about uh cross function uh different job titles I think that happens uh with security folks a lot people kind of get this like idea oh that's like super technical person knows way more than I do that's not always the case and you know we're all equals like especially in tech we all have hard jobs we all learn technical things and you just talked about like a DBA like DBA is going to know a lot of stuff that I don't and different people in security are going to know specific things and have a lot more knowledge of those things that I do so you know it's just don't compare yourself to others and uh it's it's uh it's uh yeah you know I love people I'm sorry we're all equal some of us have some more years and more mileage but we're all equal exactly I'll start somewhere yep definitely I'll start somewhere and some people learn faster some people learn slower some people have been doing for long there's so many different things that can explain uh that but ultimately you know for solving problems we're learning we're growing we're getting paid for it oh my gosh that's a great spot to be in Mason you talked early on oh I learned I love the podcast I learned all these cool tools to make it all good what were those tools you remember any of these back in the day when you were learning on your come up before you were Mason Moser we know now PowerShell Wednesday PowerShell podcast guy yeah what was up just yes Readline using objects right basic um using get member and get help right crazy uh the where clause the select clause how it works those simple things PowerShell 7 kind of some of the ps3 line helpers and the shortcuts there like a control space tab learning that it starts with a command you know learning the structure verb noun parameter thing and then like maybe a little bit of syntax like learning figuring out what a switch is may not be so important but like a string integer use the help use examples like um import and then like really cool modules like import excel and like just the powerful things you can do with those modules yeah yeah and uh most of those like little tidbits definitely came from listening to the podcast well sweet love to hear that hey if anybody else out there is listening to the podcast you're learning something maybe you're not at the point we're going to reflect on the whole journey maybe you're in the middle of the journey I love hearing from people I'm just saying hit me up share your story you know Mason earlier when we were getting to know each other you shared your background and your story with me and it is so helpful for me to understand who's listening and if I'm talking to somebody it's helpful to know kind of what they're all about and where they found PowerShell because we all do have a different journey with PowerShell a lot of them are kind of same similar you know they fall into certain buckets but you know when you're going through this journey it means a lot to people and I can see that passion so I love hearing about it please reach out and uh Mason someone's early in their journey and they're seeing you and they're like yo this guy's got it figured out what would you say to them take it day by day don't be afraid to share with others don't be afraid to talk to people that are better than you at PowerShell and worse than you at PowerShell um make a tool even if it's really small like uh creating a bunch of files automatically that you need um some templating maybe removing old files or just stay like honestly like you get a file that you download from your browser it usually goes to a default maybe downloads maybe you just have a command or a script that removes the files that you don't actually want anymore in your downloads to keep your computer clean you just run it at the end of every day just kind of get some PowerShell use in and because there's lots of stuff like you have to download an email attachment that you'll never open again like go delete it at the end of the day and just have a script that does it for you yeah smart start small absolutely i'm so into starting the absolute smallest that you can because once you get going it's a lot easier but uh you know if you set your goal like hey before the end of the day i'm going to memorize everything in vim you know you might get discouraged but if you're more realistic and you're like you know today i'm going to learn what vim motions are i'm going to learn a couple of ways to get started and i'm going to learn some resources to dive further well hey you're on a little bit of a better trajectory than if you're trying to eat an entire pizza in one sitting not that i'm speaking from experience here or anything but you know i wanted to circle back though real quick because you were talking about security and yeah they're great at some things they're not good at others some people dba's they're good at this they're not good at that i will tell you i've talked to a lot of people and i love people in general like i think humans are awesome we can do so much but these people i've talked to are awesome but they also suck at some things like me too i'm good at some things i absolutely suck at a lot of things and even people who you would think and look up to and be like oh my gosh a technical specimen that we've never seen before yeah they got some absolutely some gaps some people more than others but everybody you're looking at has some gaps some things they haven't maybe used in 15 years that they totally forgot about so we all do have absolutely something helpful to share and know what as a new vim myself i think i shared something with you mason and i let you see wow what does vim look like for a beginner i gave you that so mason to that i say you're welcome thank you my pleasure my pleasure i like setting people up for uh giving me compliments basically that's my favorite thing about the pod mason when we get back i might have some more bad jokes i might have some more good tidbits and some great questions but after this word from our sponsors we will find out this is the powershell podcast hey i'm andrew plot from the powershell podcast and i want to 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 want to keep doing it's easy fast and intuitive and when a user calls 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 mason let's get into this do you remember a turning point in your career where things were like really feeling overwhelming you didn't think you were going to do it maybe in school you're learning about some new concept and it was like oh my gosh is this the right fit for me you had any like pivotal moments like that yeah um that's a great question i got really lucky you know it doesn't always click right away and if it even i think if it wasn't clicking today um i would keep trying and hopefully it would eventually click but for me i struggled in school and i didn't know what exactly i wanted to do i told you i was a jack of all trades but then i i started kind of just taking classes that i was kind of interested in and i grew a passion out of that and now i love what i do and it's true what they say like if you love what you do never work a day in your life you might get still frustrated and still have to deal with some you know things that aren't aren't so friendly or you know enjoyable you know i gotta write documentation and things sometimes but uh find what you like yeah yeah that that really helped me that was pivotal for me and then preparing i took off yeah something that i've seen a lot of successful people who are able to do stuff that we look at and we're like oh my gosh how does someone so do it it is you organize your life or your career but really all of it in a way that serves you best so like powershell a little bit you like people well do things that make you have fun like listening to the podcast and meet some cool awesome people that serves you short term but also long term and without knowing it if you're listening to this every week if you're tuning in you're connecting with other people after an x period of time you're going to be in a completely different uh place if you write blogs if you come up with a really good refined way of taking what you're doing and turning into a blog well you can do a ton but if your life isn't really integrated everything's going to be separate it's going to be really challenging and that that's kind of normal for people earlier in their careers and stuff but like as time goes on let's try and architect our life let's try and architect our life a little bit. Serves us, we can take care of ourselves, our families. It's a balancing act that we're never going to get completely right. But I think it's important to be aware of, similar to how we want hotkeys and VIM and all that stuff, there are like equivalents of efficiencies we can make in the rest of our life that can lead us to get a lot more done in the same amount of time without having to necessarily work harder. Because that is not what I like. I don't like the work harder part. I like to work a little smarter and differently. That's what the community is about, huh? And that's really good advice. Dude, so I say a lot of things on this podcast. What sticks out to you? What did I say that initially you thought maybe wasn't true that ended up being true? Or what have I ranted about a whole bunch of times that you have not found to be true? Can you share some kind of takeaways? Because I'm yapping here all the time. I don't necessarily listen to all the podcasts and I don't have that perspective. So you could educate me. I'd appreciate that. Andrew Pla hits the mark. That's all I gotta say. You did a good job. Yeah, I mean, just like probably, I think hopefully some people heard today, I've got a passion for tech and PowerShell and security. And I hear your passion, Andrew, too. And so it comes out in the podcast and nothing you say is gonna be missed, I think. And I don't think there's anything that you've said that I've been like, yeah, that's not right. I think you say pretty true things and then, yeah. Sweet. I mean, I try to not lie to the people out here, but I do make some big claims of like, hey, invest in PowerShell. It'll be such a great choice. Your career will be different. You should put yourself out there in the community. And I'm just saying, I have a pretty high success rate with encouraging people to do these things and having it change their careers, just lead to good things all around, which is so like, think about what that's like. I just get to say words and it helps people. I really appreciate that people do listen and it is helpful for people because the fact that can be a small part of your journey is just such a blessing. As I'm gonna be doing this whole work thing forever, but the fact that I know that there's actually a human on the other end who's being helped. And guess what? You're helping me as well. Like people who've reached out and offered me support or given me feedback, you know, it's that whole community vibe. I see so many connections with like doing good things that my brain, similar to PowerShell, starts going, it's just, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Good chemicals coming out from everywhere because it is just so holistic and great. All right, I'm on the good vibes. I wanna pivot. What has your, are you working at one job? Have you been moving around jobs? Have you like gone up the ladder? What's your approach to career been? Let's see, not being too specific. I've been at one security job. Yeah, I'm at a really, I have, I'm lucky to be at a really good supportive company and around really great people. Well, if they got you PowerShell in a month of lunches, you know, respect to them. If they got you PowerShell in a month of lunches, you know, shout out to them. Yeah, that was like day one. Isn't that crazy? Helpful. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, I mean like maybe I'll go somewhere else someday, just get different experiences or maybe I'll find it throughout the community, you know? I don't really know. I'm just kind of taking it as it comes. Tech has been going absolutely insane lately and especially in the electric utility industry, which is what I work in. I don't know if we said that. Yeah, I think it's important though to have a job that serves you. Like your immediate obviously service in terms of, hey, we need money to pay our bills and eat. Huh, we'd like to eat and survive. But is it serving your skillset? Are you learning new things? Is the team around you making you feel good? You know, sometimes there are opportunities when it's like, oh crap, the environment I'm working in is like, wow, they do IT terribly. But I have a huge opportunity here to change things. Or maybe it's like they do IT terribly and they are not wanting to do anything better. They're not letting me learn any new skills. That might be a situation to move on from. But it sounds like you have a great supportive environment. I just can't emphasize enough how helpful it is to have coworkers who know what's going on and can say, hey, PowerShell is actually gonna be super helpful. Here's a book. I know some other people have actually read it and had success. Because there's a lot of people out there who are listening who are just like, their bosses don't care. They've never used automation. It's a whole new thing. And they're flying blind. Yeah, and I mean, I think if you find yourself in that position, you gotta look at the positives and no organization's perfect. And where I'm at certainly isn't perfect. And just looking at it as a opportunity. And take it slow and really think about the way you can have a positive impact on that instead of like harboring negative feelings about it. Because that's not gonna help anybody. And sometimes you can actually make like even a small impact can go a long way in that scenario. Yep. Yeah, especially if you know PowerShell. Yeah, no. Especially. I'm telling you like there's a, when I learned modules, that was crazy. And I was already good at APIs, so that helped too. But I wrote tools around the tools we had. And then it's like, you know, makes me so much quicker, better. And I can add features to almost anything that I wanna do. It's great. Absolutely. Creating modules is super helpful, but even just knowing you can install modules. Like you can borrow so much impressive code that you may never be good enough to write. Not that you couldn't, but like, you know, you might not have invested enough time to learn the com object, but you can borrow someone else's script and they just give, or module, and they just give you a command that does all of it. And all you need to know is that it exists and all of a sudden you can take full advantage of it. I hope people out there know that you can install modules. Yeah. You know, I have a hot take on this. Whoa. So we always talk about reviewing code before you run it. Funny. How often do we do that live though? And talk about how to do it in a good and efficient way. Do you read it line by line? What if you don't understand what it's doing? How do you go find that out? And we should be talking about tools, especially within PowerShell, cause there's great ones. And also like Google Dorky and different ways that you can go about doing discovery on people's code, I think. I agree with you. Cause you know what you can't do? You cannot trust a public repository. Absolutely can't. And there's many of them out there in many different languages and all that kind of thing. But if you're trusting it, you are absolutely taking a security risk. And has your organization like been okay with that being a risk that you're willing to take? I mean, maybe some have informally chosen that, but I don't think many have formally chosen that. And I also don't think most, unless they take security serious and like in a serious industry, most places aren't gonna care, but you should care and you can take the initiative to create an internal repository where you now have a process where you install it from the PowerShell gallery and then you make it available internally. I think that that's a great approach. And yeah, I don't think we talk about it enough and shoot, I talk about PowerShell a lot. So I should probably talk about it a little bit more. Can you tell me a little bit about these tools though? Cause I know like internalizing modules generally is like you take something out external, make it available internal after vetting it. And that's kind of where my knowledge ends. What other tools are there? Yeah, it's a combination of things. The way that things were set up, it was difficult to make a bunch of repositories, but I wanted to put all of my tools into a GitHub repository that I could share with my team and they could just have like a build script, even if it's not coming from like a local PowerShell server to like just do install module. Like that would be great, but maybe like putting in a ticket in the processes and explaining, it may not work out depending on where you are in the work, what privileged access you have in that and whatnot. But you just put everything into a repository, make a module that works, just pick an architecture, stick to it. Write a little bit of comment-based help and use get accurate and test with a user and make sure they can install it good. And then it runs without errors, figure out what those dependencies are that they need and try to write your build scripts around that. Jake actually had a really good take the other day when we were talking, he's like, not enough people do good build scripts either. Like you have the repository, but how do you build it? Like maybe it isn't an install module and it just runs perfectly. Maybe there's a couple of things you have to do and there's not always in the read me and sometimes you have to go read through the code just to figure that out. So yeah, putting all these tools together, it takes time, but it is very, very rewarding. I think, I mean, if you're going to be writing tools, ideally you're writing tools that your business is going to rely on to some extent, whether it's just your IT team for like things here and there or business critical stuff. And if you want to rely on that, you should absolutely be doing things securely and in a way that can be repeatable because PowerShell gallery is not going to always be available and you can't post public or private company stuff to it as well. So you can have a challenge there. So interesting approach you have though, GitHub repository. And I honestly, like when I started, I did less, I used less external modules, like some that were really useful, but I tried to mostly make my repository dependency lists, like just straight PowerShell. And then if I had to, you know, borrow code, I would just take like a snippet. I was like, this is what I need because I'm looking for a specific thing. So I'd like query GitHub for a specific line of code in the language of PowerShell, or ask the community like, hey, I'm trying to do this. They would recommend a function that I never heard of. Here's something like that. And then I could take it off and go from there. What area of security is interesting to you? Like, what about it is interesting? You like the APTs? You like hearing these wild zero day stories or what kind of grinds get you excited there? Full disclosure, I work in risk and governance and then I used to do identity work. So the Active Directory module, that's a big reason why I started PowerShell as well. And also like being able to like put reports together for auditing and different things like that. But I'm interested in a lot of different aspects of security. I think I kind of have to be in risk and governance. I do like the technical details. I think I do lean into those. And I try to force myself to talk to people as much as I can and be social and not get in the weeds every day. I think I would like that, but then I forget to go talk to people and I like that too. So yeah, I really like security operations and hearing about the exploits and looking for tactics and working with the SIM and doing threat modeling and some of that and integrating. I do bug bounties on the side too and I've just started that and it's been interesting. How is that going? Cause I remember there was like a heyday for bug bounties maybe like five to six years ago. Is it still cranking? Cause I know some people are like made millions from it. What's going on with that? Oh yeah, oh yeah. There's really good resources out there and communities like this one where people will go do live hacking and find a bug in 10 minutes because sometimes it happens like that and sometimes it doesn't. But yeah, you really have to have a persistent attitude about going and finding those and it is a slow burn much like PowerShell can be maybe a little bit more. So I don't know. I mean, I'm still in my journey. So I don't know if I can speak to it that much. Yeah, that's fun. So you find out these new tactics that attackers are using and you like putting that in your SIM so you can detect it. Is that what you're referring to earlier? Yeah, yeah. Trying to find ways to detect it. Our company does purple team exercises with an external company instead of red teaming and blue teaming. So what that means is like the red team and blue team are kind of collaborating together just to test a specific control. And then like sometimes you find like you have a million dollar tool, whatever it is. Sometimes it's outrageous or like maybe like a lower tool or open source tool or whatever. Maybe it's just a fender. And the cheaper tool will pick it up but the more expensive tool won't or the vice versa. I mean, there are so many ways. That's why I do security in depth is because there's so many ways in that you have to do it that way. And so we test our controls that way just to kind of like see what tools are working and which ones aren't. Yeah. I do find that IT in general is always changing but the security stuff, there's just a little bit more, it's a little juicier. There's a little bit more drama involved. It feels like a little more newsworthy at times, but you know. I think there's a lot in regular IT too. You just have to go find. It's like, you gotta go find your mission, you know? Yep. Security is lucky because their mission is really easy to find. But I think every IT group has a really good mission if they can just go find it. So risk and governance is what you work in. What is risk? By the way, I love risk and talking about it. And I find so many people don't think about things in terms of risk, but what is risk? Yeah. Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, it can be a formula, it can be arbitrary. There's so many different frameworks that you can apply and depending on what you're talking about, talking about, one might be better than the other. And it's very theoretical, which can one might be better than the other. be frustrating at times. But you kind of have to take it little by little, see what works, see what doesn't. But it has to be consistent when you're trying to define what your risk is. And generally, you have threats and you have vulnerabilities. And the threats are exploiting the vulnerabilities on a specific frequency. And that kind of gives you a sense of your risk. And there's a lot of statistics that you can apply. And some words do and some words don't. And it's really pretty, I feel like it's a younger industry or when I was like fleshed out or returning your risk program is difficult. You've got to get the top leadership, you know, okay with what you're doing. And everyone else has to agree on the team. And some people don't like math. And if you do like math and you want these like formulas and things to make it consistent, or you want the data, and then some people just want to do all qualitative. It's not for everyone. It's difficult. It's ambiguous. So yeah, risk is interesting because I think you're talking about like, okay, you have this software, it's vulnerable. Is it worth repairing or is that kind of thing? But I think what I find interesting about risk is sometimes things that someone in security might say, oh, that's insecure. Well, sometimes it's by choice, right? Sometimes people decide that the risk of something going wrong, it would only cost this much. It's worth taking that risk. So we're not going to secure X, Y, or Z. For me, whenever I was in a security, I was like, oh, this company is so stupid. Why would they do that? But actually sometimes there's a reason behind it. I didn't have a lot of firsthand experience of like, wow, I think this is great. This company is totally screwing it up. But you hear about it in other places or you hear someone's situation is set up and maybe their company is okay taking on that risk of maybe there's like a 0.003% chance that they'll get ransomware or whatever it is. And they're okay with the X number of unpatched machines that they have no control over. I hope not because that's just, oh, that's you're like one bad breath away from a terrible day if you're operating in that kind of environment and you're in security or IT. Yeah, absolutely. And in the electric utility industry, I can tell you that absolutely, we have that problem because we have OT. Have you ever heard of OT? Occupational therapy? Overtime? Operational technology. They use a program, PLCs, programmable logic controllers and SCADA networks. And they're a lot, usually older, expensive equipment, like hard to replace. And so it's just, and it's built to do one thing. It's not always built to be secure. And that is okay in OT's case. And we've kind of accepted that, but we have like a different set of controls to separate out the network where like, you know, there's this jump point in the network. You can only go through this point. And then it has like all these controls in between and you have fail safes and physical controls that the engineers work on and a lot you can do there. And it's like a whole other topic. But yeah, even in regular IT, there's lots of situations where you can't upgrade something or it's really difficult and the loss to the business will be greater than the benefit of doing the patch or the upgrade. You still have to plan in IT to eventually move on. And sometimes that is a longer plan, like maybe several years to choose a new vendor. Like maybe it really is that slow, especially if you're talking about like an ERP system, you know, that's integrated into do at work. So many different variables there, but we got to collaborate and work together and move forward. Those communication skills, because you say, you know, you find opportunities to do it. And I totally recommend people do that. Especially if you're thinking the technical skills, the most important thing, there's going to be a time when you realize, oh crap, I need to actually talk to people to get things done. And you're going to be so happy that you've the time to at least, you know, it's not a rusty machine, you know, it's got some stuff. Maybe you need to push the machine a little harder, but you're not starting from scratch and ring, ring, you know, pulling on the ring on the lawnmower or whatever it's been in the yard for 20 years. And I think that especially as things go forward with this whole AI thing, I don't know if you've heard about it, AI, artificial intelligence, it's like this, I don't know, chat GBT basically. But there's this whole thing. And I feel like what's the consistent that we're going to have? We're going to have humans and interacting with people. And I think that that skill might be more heavily emphasized in the future. People like it now, but I'm curious to see that. So kudos to you for realizing that's important and investing in it and having that kind of medley of like able to talk to humans and able to talk about technical stuff. That's a pretty difficult balance that a lot of people are not able to get. So kudos to you on that one. Yeah. AI, there's a lot of tough lessons that are probably going to be learned with AI, I think. That's just a personal opinion, but I feel like we can all agree on this community that there's a lot of lessons we're going to battle or not. And they won't all be very fun at all. But I use AI and it's been very beneficial. I think we have to make sure that we're using AI effectively instead of investing in all of the AI tools, work with a couple, pick one, and find out how to use AI and be, especially with programming, if you're going to use it for programming, you got to do it in small chunks. You got to be able to review the code that it's spitting out. Because I've used it enough to tell you that if you're not reading every line, you're going to miss something. And it can be a disaster, a real disaster. But there's ways we control it. We can put controls on it, just like anything else. I really like using Git repositories locally with AI to be able to create a function to do a quick commit as a save point, because it's really hard to roll back AI changes a lot of the time. And I find that if I make a commit, I can go back or forward and see the data. Hold up. Yeah. Hold up. That's actually an incredibly good point. Okay. Hold up. Git keeps tracking different versions of files. AI can really change files and screw things up majorly. And there's not always a control Z. So you're talking about incorporating this with your AI process. So if the next change goes wonky, you can do a difference. You can go back. There's a lot more flexibility that you have as someone who's slang. We're vibe code. We're slanging code. Not all of it's going to be great. Interesting. I have to repeat that because that is a pretty solid tip, I'd say. And I mean, I don't think you should let AI do its struggles when it tries to do its own commits. In my personal experience, learn to use Git. It's really useful if you actually sit down and learn it. It is another one of those things you just kind of have to grind through it. But, gosh, is it a valuable tool. And especially if you want to program with AI, it'll save you so much more and make you a lot more effective with AI. And there's lots of other ways, but nobody talks about those. It's only the people who are really like pushing AI in their code that kind of recognize these skills. Mason, man, we covered quite a bit. This has been a pleasure. You agreed to do PowerShell Wednesday on one day notice. You agreed to do the podcast on three hour notice. Because I was like, I might as well over here. So kudos to you, man. You crushed it, in my opinion. I want a little bit. Let's go back. So you joined the PDQ Discord a while ago. People out there, maybe they haven't. And we're not the only community in the world. If you find other communities that work for you, user groups, whatever that is. If you have a great work group where you work, that's fantastic. But if you have no one in your corner on your PowerShell journey, you should join us in the PDQ Discord, discord.gg slash PDQ. Mason, I saw your first message was July of 2024. So how has your experience in the PowerShell scripting channel of the PDQ Discord been since then? Really good. I mean, I could have done more. I could have asked more questions. I think that I had a professor that really pushed during discussions. If you are going to give a question, make sure that it's a thought out and a good one. And so I live by that. And I think I would encourage people to post more questions, but ask good ones so you can get good answers. That's kind of my take on it. And I feel like I've been involved enough, at least reading and seeing what people are posting about, kind of seeing what's going on, listening to some of the podcasts, watching some of the PowerShell Wednesdays, which have been amazing. Yeah. And taking it little by little. Awesome. Well, thank you for that. One thing I want to see, I want to see beginners ask more questions so badly. I want to see not the people who've been around and gotten warmed up. I am so excited later in this year, any new question I see for a while within limits, I'm sending the person swag as a way to incentivize and just say thank you and make sure they feel the warm welcome. What do you think about my messaging here that I've been sharing, which is you are allowed to learn PowerShell. You're allowed to get frustrated to the point where you quit under the clause that you put it into a nicely formed question and share it with the world. So like, yeah, you're frustrated. We don't want you to be there for too long. But whatever it was, you weren't able to figure out whatever error you were getting, whatever, you have to ask it somewhere else at the very least to help others. But also because you can't not be making progress every day, even if it's just a little bit. What do you think about that messaging? Because I think it's pretty solid. I think I'm going to lean into it because I don't know. I think it encourages people in a way that doesn't make it feel like they have to make the choice. But what do you think? Yeah, I think it's good. And then I think if you get a little bit of engagement, some of the things that helped me in the community was like, don't be afraid to direct message someone that's giving you an answer, because they may break open in a one-on-one and it limits the noise of others. And it's not that that other feedback isn't helpful too. Maybe you can start a couple, but it just helps facilitate the conversation, go forward. I think that can help a lot too. Otherwise, your message I think is great. No, I think DMs are fantastic. A lot of my, I don't know if a lot of my success, but a lot of my comfort that I've gotten in my career has been from reaching out to people and you reach out, they're happy to help. Usually, sometimes people are super busy and there's nothing wrong with that, but more times than not, they'll respond. And once you get that conversation going, well, you can go back to it in two weeks and it's like an old friend. It's not like, oh crap, so-and-so who I am afraid to talk to. So it's absolutely worth investing in it. And you get the benefit of sort of making friends over the years as well, which is a pretty, actually a big benefit, but I know people are here for PowerShell. So yeah, the code stuff is good too. Well, thank you, Mason. I could chitchat all day with you. I look forward to seeing you continue your grind, continue the journey, and maybe have you on here in a little bit whenever I'm actually better at VIM and we can geek out together and we can hit the VIM motions. Yeah, maybe I'll get my first blog out and it'll be more direct on kind of what we did. And maybe this podcast isn't going to go out for a couple of weeks from now, so maybe there's time for you to send it over to me to put it in the show notes. I don't know. I'm just going to say anything we talked about that hasn't linked will be in the description down low. Mason, thank you for joining us. Shout out to everybody out there for listening. Check us out on the PDQ discord, discord.gg slash PDQ PowerShell scripting channel. And there's a learn PowerShell channel. Oh my gosh. Dedicated for people who are learning PowerShell. That's exciting. Hopefully it's a little bit easier for you to ask questions. You don't feel as intimidated. You hear these people talking about this wild stuff. We're keeping it simple this year. And this is the year that you learn PowerShell. Seriously, you are going to learn PowerShell and you are not going to be the only one. You got some friends who are along for the ride. I've heard messages from a lot of people who are on their journey. They've really been enjoying that vibe. So hey, we're doubling down on beginners and teaching PowerShell this year. So sign on up. All right, Mason, thank you so much for joining me. I feel like there's something else I'm supposed to say at the end of these, but you don't have any social media that you want to plug. So if there's anything, it'll be in the show notes. Last message for the people. What do hard questions with no prep? I feel like I've had a couple of good one-liners before. So trying to think of something else, I guess. Just don't get discouraged. How about that? Don't get discouraged. Finding ways to get help. There's always a different way to look up something or help file somewhere or a blog post. Learn those ways that you can find information. And the community is a good way to do that. I think that sort of reminds you of design your life around what's conducive to you and going to send you somewhere. It's the same with like this. It's like you have to figure out the information sources, the communities, all that kind of stuff before you can operate at a higher level and get to the point where you would be what I consider security informed. You can't just do that on your own. You have to be tapping into external sources of knowledge or authorities. So boom. All right, Mason, I'm going to let the people go. Enjoy your car rides, walk safe, drive safe, all the things, do it safely and learn PowerShell this year. And I guess that's it. Take care, everybody. Thanks for listening to the PowerShell podcast. The PowerShell podcast is a PDQ production making device management simple, secure, and pretty damn quick.
