One quote to rule them all: “The renaissance of the command line”
Jeffrey Snover is not only the “father” of PowerShell, he became the iconic advocat of Microsoft’s data center focussed transformation. He is the poster child of many Microsoft focussed IT pros and enthusiasts, celebrating the improvements in command line administration as an accelerator of their own businnesses and carreers. In brief, I’d personally name him “Redmonds Godfather of Automation”.
We talk about his almost 20 years journey to establish the fundamentals of a modern datacenter and automation toolchain from his early days in Redmond, the lessons learned from wmic.exe and his vision of an OS agnostic automation framework around PowerShell (Core).
This interview was recorded during the PowerShell Conference Europe 2018 in Hannover on April 19, 2018.
Show notes:
- Intro/Outro: Bruce Payette about the roots of automation at Microsoft
extracts from Sliding Windows, Episode 4 - PowerShell Conference 2018 in Hannover: http://www.psconf.eu
YT: Video playlist from 2018 - Matt Weinberger: Microsoft’s longtime Windows boss is leaving the company amid a huge executive reorganization
- Dave Thompson: Microsoft Loses Key Cloud Exec (Dave Thompson will step down from his position as corporate VP for Microsoft Online by year’s end.)
- Implicit Remoting
- Just Enough Administration (Overview)
- J. Peter Bruzzese: PowerShell for Exchange 2007: Less Work, More Play
- Mike Ricciuti: “Gates puts his money on Longhorn” (ZDNet, 2003)
- WP: Colin Powell
- WP: Bog Muglia
- YT: A Historical Architectural Tour of PowerShell – Bruce Payette (PSConf EU 2018)
- Jim Truher: PowerScripting Podcast, Episode 163
- Lee Holmes: PowerScripting Podcast, Episode 85
- PowerShell Magazine: An interview with PowerShell expert Kenneth Hansen
- WP: XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation)
- WP: Apollo Computer
- Jeffrey Snover: “Hate Add-Member? (PowerShell’s Adaptive Type System to the Rescue)”, 2008
- YT: Jeffrey Snover at psconf.eu 2018: PowerShell 2018 – State of the Art (Keynote)
- rModule (“WindowsCompatibility”)
http://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/WindowsCompatibility/ - Brad Smith: Azure Sphere OS (For the first time ever, Microsoft will distribute its own version of Linux)
- Dr. Nikolai Bezroukov: XENIX – Microsoft Short-lived Love Affair with Unix
- Microsoft: Common Engineering Criteria
- Monad Manifesto
- WP: VMS DCL: DIGITAL Command Language
- Project Honolulu: Windows Admin Center
- Mike Nelson: The death of Nano Server
- Satya Nadella: Hit Refresh
- YT: Jeffrey Snover video portrait from 2007
- WP: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Chapters
- Intro Airtone ft. Bruce Payette 0:00.000
- Welcome Jeffrey to Hannover 1:35.393
- A social shell 3:30.168
- The origin of PowerShell 6:44.219
- PowerShell 1.0 13:47.596
- From Monad to PowerShell 23:00.228
- The perfect tribe 27:51.156
- Lessons learnd from CLI 33:55.529
- Objects and APIs 41:09.367
- PowerShell Core 44:23.391
- DSC, Idempotency 52:37.439B
- Beyond PowerShell 1:03:51.250
- Glitches 1:09:34.624
- Hit refresh 1:14:55.759
- The Renaissance 1:22:58.820
- Epilogue 1:29:47.643
- about_Leibniz 1:31:07.631
References
- PowerShell Conference EU: Jeffrey Snover – State of the Art (Keynote 2018)
- AUDIO TIP: Sliding Windows, Episode 4: The X files, with Bruce Payette
- VIDEO TIP: DevOps Enterprise Summit 2015: Jeffrey Snover – “The Cultural Battle To Remove Windows from Windows Server”
Bonus content
- Auto generated transcript (via Amazon Transcribe): HTML
- Behind the mic (Video from the recording, Vimeo)
Music