Only 4 months later??

Can you believe it?  Based on my blogging history you would have thought that the next update would not have come for MONTHS….maybe even years!

Well, guess what… here we are!

And now for the update…..

Get-AzBlogUpdate… Prod Successful

It’s been a wild few months of amazing transitions and craziness.  We have gone live in Azure at work, while the world is in the throes of a global pandemic.  This means I have gone from traveling to King of Prussia, PA about once a month to working 100% remote.  So the question becomes… how does one continue to lead a HEAVY Azure Cloud and Azure DevOps Migration while fully remote?  Honestly, the same way that you did when or if you were there in person.   You just do the needful.  You just keep… getting it done!

I felt coming into this journey with my company that it was going to be another “consulting gig” and then I would move on.  I can honestly say that moving on from my former company, I worked with THE BEST OF THE BEST.

Now that we are 10 months in (my Gawd it’s been 10 months), I can truly say that I did leave my consulting life behind.  You may see that as a negative but I certainly don’t.  I joined a team that was in the midst of a cloud migration.  I am writing this post after the 4th completely successful change window that runs in the very early morning on weekends.  We do this to impact our customers as little as possible, mind you this is still during the quarantine period of Covid-19.  I credit my company, that we are running “business as usual” as much as possible during this once in a century time that we are in.  We continually ENABLE our clients to do “business as usual” during this crazy time with our products.

This ain’t a sales pitch, I am just saying that in the 3 years of consulting work, it was difficult to generate ownership necessary to fuel a true migration. We would go in pontificating DevOps and Cloud Migration but we were talking to people so far in the weeds, that they were the dog from Nintendo Duck Hunt. They may have understood the end goal but they were honestly looking years in the future to get there.  Now that I am back on the front lines, I can completely understand where those folks are/were.

#1 take away from this post!!!  — Look here first if TL;DR —  A #CloudMigration is a journey.  It doesn’t matter if you had the CTO of Azure sitting next to you, you won’t do it “right the first time”.

Your… yes you … your migration is unique.   If it worked for HUGE COMPANY #2…. that doesn’t mean it will work for you. Your application has never seen the cloud, no matter what company you work for.   If you are migrating an application and that is really your application, then it’s a brand new thing.  Don’t beat yourself up over the time it took to get it there.  You are plowing brand new ground for this set of code.

Just get it done.

Then no matter how small the effort, this is a BRAND NEW THING ON THE CLOUD! Take Pride in what you have done.

Mrs. ScriptWarrior wife now encourages me to write a book about the dichotomy of the consulting side vs the in the weeds side.  It’s a very interesting optic to look through.

If you are getting discouraged that your Cloud Migration will never happen… keep going!

If you are a DevOps engineer that is a team of 1 that is trying to drive adoption … keep going!

You may be one person or one deployment away from SUCCESS!

 

 

What a year it has been…

So here we are on December 28 as the year of 2019 slips away.  What a crazy year it has been.

The last update was about my serious knee injury.  Fast forward from April to June and in those 2 months, I dealt with daily severe pain while having a completely severed ACL and still traveling almost every week for work.  We also purchased a new house and you know what that means… Did I hire a crew to move my furniture… nah.  Strap on a brace and gut it out like I always do. Then came the day I had anxiously been waiting for… SURGERY DAY!  By the unending grace of God, a full ACL replacement was not necessary and my amazing doctor was able to repair the ligament.  The detail here is that it means a 6-month recovery instead of a full year.  God absolutely knows what he’s doing… that new house that we had moved into very quickly ramped up to having 11 people and 3 dogs living in it.  His perfect plan had given us a house where we could help our adult daughters during some transitions they were going through as well.

While all this was happening there was another normal that was quickly changing.  I had become one of the senior consultants at my former company and prided myself on the work that I was doing.  I did however miss a few things about being part of a more corporate environment, I just hadn’t realized that yet. As a traveling consultant, I interacted with many of my clients in 2-week engagements.  This meant that I would come in and drop a pipe bomb of training and enable as much change as possible and then say peace out and head to the next client.  We did our best to follow up but there was always another client waiting for their turn.  Teaching is one of the most rewarding professions, in my opinion.  I love teaching and helping teams to reach the next level but that I now realize is exactly what I was missing.  I was helping teams to get started on their journey, to their next iteration of what their team would become, but I would never be around to see the change.  Best case, I would go back months later and change would have taken place but I would have no idea how they got there and I would have only a few hours to assess where they are and then try to push forward again.

This all lead me to start looking for a change, that and 3 yrs of constant travel was not making Mrs. Scriptwarrior very happy anymore 🙂 It didn’t take long to find an incredible opportunity.  I joined a company as an Azure DevOps Architect and I have enjoyed the last 5 months of leading a team of people through a fundamental shift in the way work is done.  I can finally see the fruits of my work every single day and it has brought back the rewarding feeling that I didn’t know I was missing.

I know I keep saying this specifically on this blog… but in 2020 I look forward to having more time to blog more.  I have been working on some amazing tech that I can’t wait to share about.  Be on the lookout for an upcoming technical post about some fun I have been having with Azure SQL Managed Instance Failover Groups.

For now… Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and yours.

–Scriptwarrior out

Pain filled moment of carity

Hello Scriptwarrior here again…

So Easter Weekend i was playing dodge ball with my kids and a bunch of middle schoolers at my church, as a leader, and i bent over to pick up one of the foam balls that we play with and it felt like someone pelted me on the side of my right knee with a baseball.  Then my vision faded and came back for a moment and i hear an audible thwack!  I thought this was the ball or object that just impacted the outside of my right knee hitting the gym floor, when in fact it was the sound of my righ ACL giving up the ghost.  My knee immediately got hot and #OldGuyNeedsToSitDown UGH!

Now a week out after seeing my Orthopedic surgeon, i am settling into my new normal of dealing with some pretty severe pain while i wait for his schedule to free up. I just had a pain filled half delirious epiphany that this is exactly what #DevOps is trying to solve.

I know you are like … um what?  Just stay with me here.  My knee has like 0 pain!  I have a completely severed ligament in my knee and it’s actually not all that painful.  Is it wicked swollen and very stiff … yes! Are the surrounding muscles screaming for having to compensate for something that should just work?  YES absolutely.  The pain i am dealing with at the moment has very little to do with my knee directly.  I am struggling with severe calf and hamstring pain to the point that 800 mg of Advil is *CUTE* and not even touching it.  I don’t want to start the heavy stuff that i have from when i had ACL surgery on the other knee 2 years ago cuz it makes me sick.  I digress about the pain cuz it’s just that… pain.

So as i was “walking” out to the kitchen from the office, i realized that this is a very good example of why DevOps is so important.  When the glue that should make everything very easy doesn’t work properly it gets very painful for the other parts.  My calf and hamstring are screaming and angry cuz my knee is not doing it’s job so my whole body is compensating.  Soooo many clients that engage with Nebbia have awesome software and awesome technology but getting their software from their teams to the technology is not awesome.  That process is not doing it’s job so the entire system feels the pain.  It can takes months or even years at times to get the whole system numbed to the point where the process of software team to technology is a seamless process where it just happens.

When you walk down the hallway at home today, do you think about how your knee is making your leg move? I sure as heck am thinking about that right now cuz it’s broken.  One of the famous things said on the IT Ops side of the house is it’s kind of like a marriage.  When it’s going good you don’t hear a word from your spouse but when it’s not working….watch out! The same applies to the Organization as a whole.  When one side of the DevOps equation is broken for one reason or another the whole organism suffers.

DevOps is the knee that just makes walking down the path of your companies vision easier.  The hamstring has to write the code and the calf is the Ops side that pushes the foot to move forward.  When the DevOps journey is not working correctly or just doesn’t exist how do you move forward?  PAINFULLY!

If you are are feeling this pain, reach out to me or my company @NebbiaTech and let’s make the pain go away!

–ScriptWarrior Out!

Goodbye jtruman0917… hello ScriptWarrior

ScriptWarrior here….

So it has bothered me for a while but, one of my online identities has not matched the rest of my online identities for a while.  I have had an XBOX Live account since way back in the day and for a while i used jtruman0917 as a user name.  I follow a methodology where I setup a gamertag or email address and tag a 4 digit code on the end.  What is this code you may ask?  Pro Tip: Use your anniversary as your four digits.  🙂  This means that every time you log into any site or service that you have to type in your username you remind yourself of your anniversary. This reminds you everyday of the blessings of your wife and family!

I have gone through the xbox live user flow probably 10+ times to change my username from my old username. Why did I not change it? Cuz it cost $10.  Well this morning i bit the bullet and changed the tag.  Why did i change the tag?

The reason that i changed the tag was that 0917 is not my anniversary anymore.  My anniversary is now 1027.  My main email is ScriptWarrior1027@gmail.com for example.  If you have any questions or want to reach out to me feel free. 🙂

Here’s a quick minute of truth that I feel i need to share. I have been married and divorced twice and I am now on my third and last marriage.  Now let me ask myself some seemingly hard questions that i actually think about often.

What did the first two marriages teach me?

If I had a time machine would I go back and change anything, what would I change?

My first marriage was to my high school sweetheart and we got married at 21 and 20.  One thing I would change would be to maybe wait a little longer to get married.  We were both so young and didn’t know what we wanted out of life. We both felt that marriage was the next logical step in what our families and society required of us. It just made sense. We were going to start a family and do what everyone does when they are that age.  Fast forward around 5 years and life happened and we quickly realized that our futures were not on the same path.  While we had tried to start a family it just didn’t happen. We then found we had divergent goals but the 5 years taught us more about ourselves and each other.

I stayed single for about 6 months and then decided it was time to start dating again.  I had a few dates with 1 person and before you know it we found out that God had plans that we were going to be parents.  I decided to “make it work” with this person since forever all I wanted was a family. Fast forward 5 years and guess what?  Divergent goals and not knowing each other as well as we should have before we started a family caught up with us.  Would i change anything… maybe but on the other hand i would absolutely do it again because from that marriage… I have 2 amazing children.

I promised myself that i would not do this again.  I was not looking for another wife and said maybe it was time to just be like the world and PARTAAAY like I was the college kid that i never got to be.  I was married pretty much all the years I was in college.  I started to frequent establishments of food and drink that had young female waitresses that are very popular in the Clearwater FL area.  These restaurants were an environment where i could try to be a person i wasn’t. I quickly learned that as i was sitting there eating wings and drinking beer, I found that i was often feeling more like a parent than a college kid.  I would sneer at the drunk guys that were oogling these girls and thinking to myself… you probably have daughters and this is someone’s daughter.  How do you sit there and lick your lips at some 20 something girl when the mother of your children that has sacrificed and done everything for you is sitting home doing what she does? Look i am not trying to judge here I am just talking about my internal struggle during this time in my life.  I then was sitting at work one day when i got a Skype message from a manager of another department.  She said that she liked my taste in Christian music. I was like wait a minute?  How does she know what i am listening to?

**Looks at the screen and breaks the 4th wall** so you are probably wondering how i was going to Wing House and Hooters and listening to Christian music all the time?  I said it was definitely a time in my life that i was struggling to figure out what my next step was **Ok back to 1st person again.**

While I was at work I was listening to a lot of Jeremy Camp, Pillar and Skillet on a streaming service called Slacker.com.  It turns out that every time the music changed it would tweet out that I was listening to a new artist. Then I had some integration between twitter and LinkedIn so yeah i was spamming the crap out of my entire network with… Hey Scriptwarrior is listening to Jeremy Camp on Slacker.com.  So this manager is a very strong Christian manager that reached out to me to say that she liked my music choices. I was very transparent with this person about how i was struggling finding the new normal in my life. She let me know that there was Bible study that she helped lead AT WORK!  I said sure I don’t like working through lunch, so i’ll bring my bible and show up.  The next week I met my future wife ATHENA! The manager from another group that reached out to me… **Fourth wall again** so just remember she persued me 🙂 ** The moment she walked into the small conference room where I was already sitting down waiting for others to show up, I literally felt something inside me.  Like God touched me and i thought to myself… what was that?  Fast forward 5+ years and guess what… Gods know what he is doing!  We are happier than we have ever been and as GOD as my witness she is stuck with me forever. We have 5 kids together in our blended family.  Her children Jasmin, Chris and Cassandra have become my kids and my kids Austin and Tatiana are hers.  We even have 3 amazing grandkids that we are helping raise. I could not be more blessed than I am right now.

Would I change anything in my past…sure there are decisions that were made in day to day life that I might have changed. The decisions and the relationships that I had in the past have brought me to this very day where I am standing at my desk writing this post. Every day that i lived in the 20+ years of my first two relationships taught me what I wanted in life and taught me to value the amazing blessing that is my wife and family that I have now.  Love you my GG and my amazing family.

–ScriptWarrior out

Still have some time since it’s 4 am…

Since i still have some time before i have to wake up my wife and family why not do a BOGO on post today 🙂

Where did the name Scriptwarrior come from?

I have many family members and close friends that have served or are active duty in the military.  Fresh out of high school i had a passion for the military and looked into joining.  I quickly realized that since i had Epilepsy until i was a  young adult, i was medically unfit to serve.  I wanted to serve but couldn’t so instead i did what i could to support those around me that can and do serve.

When i joined Twitter, i had to come up with the digital brand that i was going to hang my shingle on while doing work on the interwebs. I am of course a PowerShell evangelist and wanted to tie it in with some type of military / warrior mentality. In a moment of inspiration as i was sitting there writing down twitter handles and repeatedly saying…. nope that’s stupid and mashing the backspace key. @ScriptWarrior just fit and i was surprised when it was available.

I have given over the years to the Wounded Warrior Project and Til Valhalla Project to support our troops. Find a non-profit that benefits vets and JUST GIVE.  These men, women and their families of the military are the reason that you can get up everyday and have the freedom to either CRUSH IT or just sit on your can and binge watch @garyvee videos.

#Freedom #CrushingIT #Entrepeneur

Remember those that give some and the some that gave ALL!

–Scriptwarrior out.

What makes ScriptWarrior tick?

This post is going to be a bit more personal than most that i have blogged before.  I feel lately that my career has absolutely hit critical mass.  I was telling my story the other day to a student at a college that asked how i got into tech and it helped me to really look at what got me to this point.

Fresh out of college with a Bachelor of Comp Sci degree i bounced around Minneapolis MN trying to find a career.  I came very close to taking a ColdFusion job but they ended up going with the other candidate.  This caused me to contact family i had in FL and secured a potential job as long as I decided to move to FL.  I moved to FL in 2001 and worked on a Systems Migration Ennoblement team with a staffing company headquarters.  I worked at the headquarters around 3 years and did everything from Systems Migration, to Project Management, to Perl Scripting / AS400.  At that time i met one of the best professional mentors that likely doesn’t even know the impact they had on my career.

I worked with @Kyro at this staffing company and he showed me the value of the HUSTLE.  He showed me how to multiply my time and make impact in my position no matter what i was doing. He also approached me to work for a friend of his as their sole IT guy for a small family based business.  I worked for this family business for around 4 years, while still working very closely with @Kryo.  He was off building multiple businesses but would still check in from time to time.  Unfortunately around 2008 when the economy tanked, the family business took a large hit and simply couldn’t afford my services any longer.  I then bounced around Naples, Fort Myers area for a few years trying to find out what is next for my career.

During this time, I found PowerShell and really started to become the System Engineer that i would become in the next season of my career.  I started attending community events around this time and met Microsoft MVP’s and Rockstars in the industry that give back as much as @kyro did for me.  I really dug into the community and then started to wonder where my next career step would come from.  I reached out to PowerShell and SQL MVP at that time @cmille19 that i am still very good friends with.  I boldly reached out and asked if there were any openings in Tampa FL area that he might be aware of.  He took the time to reply and let me know that a position had just opened in Raymond James Financial where he still works to this day.  I went on to work at RJ for around 2 years and was able to really move the needle while i was there.

Life happened fast over the next few years and before you know it I am running the Microsoft Azure Cloud infrastructure for a Global Brand.  I had the amazing opportunity to run the cloud for that org for over a year before the business had to make some changes and i was affected.  I then reached out to my network and again the Microsoft MVP community stepped up again.

I was out of work for 4 days before @EstebanFGarcia reached out to me and said that I should come work for him.  I didn’t hesitate to say yes.  To work daily with people of the caliber that i have been able to in my career has been an absolute blessing. I look forward to hopefully one day being able to affect the younger generation and pay forward the amazing opportunities that have been afforded me by Kyle, Chad and Esteban.

To Kyle Roche – @kyro – Kyle thank you so much for showing me the Hustle.  Your commitment to family, business and crushing it every day has truly helped me be successful.

To Chad Miller – @cmille19 – Chad thank you so much for the being the main inspiration that got me into the Microsoft Community. I also am amazed that i can call the creator of SQL PSX a good friend of mine.  For those that don’t know… quite a bit of the code that Chad and the collaborators created during the SQL PSX modules are now shipped with the SQL product as SQLPS.

To Esteban Garcia – @EstebanFGarcia – Esteban thank you so much for reaching out to me and giving me the opportunity to join you at Nebbia Technology.  The passion that you exude everyday is a true inspiration. The love that you show for your family, employees and community is truy awe inspiring. Let’s continue to CRUSH IT at Nebbia Tech.

–ScriptWarrior OUT!

Well as i said over 2 years ago…

It absolutely has been interesting 🙂  As i said in my previous post, i joined the amazing team at Nebbia Technology in Orlando.  I can honestly say that when i wrote that last blog post i had no idea how amazing the team really is.  I work with some of the most talented thought leaders in the industry on a daily basis.  It is truly a joy to go to work everyday.  I am working as an Azure and Azure DevOps consultant out of my home office mostly or on-site with our valued clients.

I have the opportunity to enable change in organizations from the inside out and it’s an amazing feeling.   I shared this on social media as well but i got this feed back this week from my Director of Business Development … had a call with **client** today and they said they are really seeing all the work we did with them last year come to fruition. Client said that one of the quickest wins with the biggest ROI was the build automation project Jeff Truman did with their 2 mobile apps. Client said it has completely shifted the mentality of that team and they now build things end to end instead of just building it and not working about deployment.  It’s so gratifying to enable our clients to truly transform the way they work and even the way they think about work.

I know i said it in the last post too, but this time i really promise that i will continue blogging more actively in the future.  I am also going to link here some of the blogging i have been doing at work.

Till next time (Which will be soon)  — Scriptwarrior out

Well that was interesting….

ScriptWarrior here… it’s been a few months again but i promise this time that I will be blogging more often.   Quite a bit has happened since the last time i posted.  I did do quite a bit of work on the DSC Non-domain joined Azure IAAS project that i spoke about in my last post.  It was great experience and I was excited to place the configuration into production and let it rip.  I was about a week or two from deployment and unfortunately i was unable to complete the project.

I came into work on Dec 1st, and was notified that my position was no longer really a thing with the company i was working for.  It was a complete departure from normal for me and i was unemployed for the first time in quite a few years.  I started to reach out to my extensive network and weighing out some opportunities that i had been keeping an eye on.  Then literally 4 days after becoming unemployed… i was employed again!

I have now joined an amazing team in Orlando FL called Nebbia Technology.  I am working as an Azure Cloud / DevOps Consultant and could not be any happier.  I am super excited for 2017 and all that it has in store.

I will make it a point to be posting back here at least once a month minimum.

That’s my End Of Year / New Years Resolution 🙂

Check out the Nebbia Technology blog post about me joining the company … here.

Merry Christmas and See you all next year!

–ScriptWarrior Out

 

Yes my blog still exists and so do i…. :o)

Hello All,

I just realized it’s been nearly 2 years since i last posted here. I have made some moves and PowerShell is still very central to all that i do on a daily basis.

Lately i have really been digging into Desired State Configuration and I am prepping my talk for this month’s Tampa PowerShell User Group. I am going to discuss a project that I have been kicking through at work.
Securing a non-domain joined server via Desired State Configuration to mimic Group Policy Object Domain Joined Security.

Stay Tuned
-ScriptWarrior

Welcome to my session…. please turn up your phone!

I have been meaning to get back to my much ignored blog so here goes 🙂

I took the reigns of the Tampa Bay Powershell User Group about 5 months ago now.  I have very much enjoyed firing the group back up and getting some traction back under this community in the Tampa area.

So why the Title of this post you may ask?…. One of the ground rules of my User Group is just as it reads above.

Turn your cellphone ringer UP not down when you come to the meeting.  In fact, i normally make an announcement that the person that gets the most work calls during the meeting will win a book or some other type of schwag.  Why you ask?  We all know that most of the people that come out to a Powershell User group are either interested in using Powershell or are already using it.  It is also assumed that they are likely Windows Admins on a IT Operations type team.

We all know what those 2 things mean…. ON CALL!.  If you are on call and you are getting calls during the user group then it’s obvious that you need Automation.  Powershell is no longer a fringe subject … it is now literally a necessity if you are in IT OPS or even Development.  There are just not enough hours in a day to deal with every situation that comes up manually.  Remote Desktop is not the way to manage windows infrastructure any more.

So… Turn your phone up and get the most obnoxious ring tone.  If your phone is ringing during my session…. You need Powershell most of all 🙂

— ScriptWarrior