Confessions

PowerShell Team

Andy’s confessional BLOG POST has inspired me -  I’ve got my own confession to make:  I fricking LOVE PowerShell. 

I admit it.  It started years ago when the pieces of PowerShell started coming together.  Someone would write a script and then get the other guys on the team into their office to show it off.  We’d stare at the screen all EYES AND SMILES with a deep admiration of both the script writer and the technology! 

Those moments felt like a celebration and affirmation of all that was good about human intelligence and ability of technology to amplify that intelligence to achieve something truly special.  At some point it hit me: prior to PowerShell I couldn’t remember the last time that I had moment of sheer unadulterated BLISS using a computer.   I used to have those when I started using computers, you’d discover the power of some utility, figure out how to make it do something clever (maybe even useful) and then impress your friends, peers and yourself.  Somewhere among all those mouse clicks, that magic seemed to somehow fade away.

As a member of the PowerShell team, I’ve been having those BLISS moments every week for the last few years.  Every couple days someone will do a checkin then write a script and invite me to their office to get a demo.  I especially love it when someone will figure out how to write a couple dozen lines of script to tie a couple of large components to do something amazingly novel (I like say that "No one cares about your first million lines of code but once you have that, you can write 50 lines and change the world!")

There is something truly wonderful about being inspired, putting together the pieces in a novel way and producing a script that solves a problem in an interesting way.  You can step back and admire it’s elegance.  You can express goodwill to others by sharing it with them and by doing so, gain a debt of gratitude.  You can post it somewhere and achieve a sliver of immortality and perchance fame? 

You just have to think for a moment about wonderful work of people like MOW, Dmitry, Keith Hill and dozens/hundreds of others (sorry I didn’t mention each of you!) to see what I’m talking about.  Look at what they have done and the impact they have had – it’s just wonderful.  If one of them gets hit by a beer-truck tomorrow, the world will be a lesser place.

PowerShell is all about solving problems.  Getting my butt out of bed and into work every morning is one of those problems and it does a great job solving it.  🙂

Enjoy!

Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]
Windows Management Partner Architect
Visit the Windows PowerShell Team blog at:    http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShell
Visit the Windows PowerShell ScriptCenter at:  http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs/msh.mspx

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