June meeting - 6/18 - 6pm

This months meeting will take place on Wednesday, the 18th and is being hosted at the WorkSmart office in Durham. Food arrives at 6pm (courtesy of Sapien Technologies) and if you have any special requests for the pizza let me know, further details below and hope to see you there!

http://www.worksmart.com
100 Meredith Dr #200, Durham, NC 27713
(919) 484-1010

This month we have another exciting speaker lined up, Mr. Jim Christopher. If you’ve heard his courses on Pluralsight or met him at a PowerShell Saturday you know we are very fortunate to have him agree to present, and particularly on a topic that will appeal to everyone; “Developing Tools for Operations”.

Per Jim, Microsoft and the community have done a great job at providing software frameworks to solve problems for developers creating applications; however, the team of people dedicated to managing the software once it's in production - "operations" as they're known - are usually left under-tooled and over-worked. This session will provide a demonstration of what I consider proper operations tooling around a very common problem: managing database entities for a production system. We will compare the canned solution developers tend to create against an operations-focused toolset based on PowerShell, and see how they both fare against common scenarios. The goal of this talk is to give you - as a software, operations, or support engineer - a clear expectation of what "proper" operations tooling needs to look like, how this fosters a devops culture, and how PowerShell gets you there without any fuss.

Mr. Christopher Bio: Jim Christopher has been developing software professionally for over 19 years, working on projects ranging from Windows to the Web, from device drivers to enterprise software solutions. His experience spans the scientific, defense, education, and gaming industries. He currently runs Code Owls LLC, providing software development services to small businesses out of Charlotte NC. Jim spends a lot of time promoting PowerShell as a platform for software tools and managing about a dozen PowerShell-focused open source projects - including StudioShell, an automation environment for Visual Studio. Jim maintains a technical blog at http://www.beefycode.com and has been a PowerShell MVP for the last four years.