Boston PowerShell Hackathon 2017 Summary

Last week I had the pleasure of hosting the first ever Boston PowerShell Hackathon. Despite the best efforts of the Boston weather, the night was a success. I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who attended, the sponsors Rubrik, Zerto, Nutanix, and for everyone that helped me make it possible.

There are many things I’d like to say about the event, but this tweet sums it up perfectly:

Bringing together techies with a shared passion for PowerShell in a room for 3 hours with free beer, pizza, hands-on labs, a scripting challenge, and no vendor ppts, equaled the best level of peer interactivity at any user event that I’ve ever been to. It wasn’t just about writing scripts, demonstrating use cases for existing modules/cmdlets, it was about people talking to people and sharing knowledge. Love it.

Everyone enjoyed having the labs available for scripting, even if just to look at:

Choosing a winner at the end seemed almost superfluous because everybody who took part, stood up to demo, or talk about their effort was a winner in my eyes. Cheesy I know, but it was unfair to say any script was “better” than the others, given that better is subjective to where you are starting from and what you tried to do.

That being said, I do want to mention my favorite script of the night which we collectively declared the “Best Script” and that was from Roman:

Relatively new to PowerShell, Roman Orlov merged multiple ideas with the help of Tom McShane (not pictured, that’s me) to build a script which used Measure-Command and Invoke-WebRequest to benchmark the response time of the HTML5 interface for Rubrik, Zerto, and Nutanix. It was a simple script and I liked the vendors being challenged. If you’re interested here was the result (Zerto top, Rubrik middle, Nutanix bottom):I’d like to also say a big thanks to Chris Monahan and Chi Chiu for the demo of analyzing scripts for best practices with Invoke-ScriptAnalyzer, Chris Moriarty and Erik Seales for their idea on temperature management of VMs, Nick Getchell and Kanji Bates for a demo of Get-GitLabVersion and Warren Frame for demonstrating use cases of Poshbot for automating Slack using PowerShell. Finally, thanks to Dan Grinnell for putting in some good ideas and letting me moan about Zerto API changes.This was the first Boston PowerShell Hackathon, but it certainly won’t be the last! I’m already looking forward to running another in 2018 and this time I’ll try to pick a better night for the weather. In the meantime, happy scripting.

Joshua