It’s funny how many posts there are from people who have migrated to Octopress. What would motivate someone to post their migration experience? I think I understand why. It’s such a shift in thinking that it’s worth talking about. My migration experience was so much pleasant that I feel that I must let everyone know.

I cannot believe I’ve been at ThoughtWorks for 2 years now! My colleague Aaron Erickson has written an excellent writeup on why (work at) ThoughtWorks. I couldn’t agree more!

Reading another colleague’s post a while ago inspired me to write a little retrospective of my own. Thanks Rose, you are wise beyond your years!

An interesting thing about 2011 is that my resolutions from earlier became quite prominent. Given that 8 months of 2011 were spent on a large account with less technical focus, I’m amazed at some of the technical things that I’ve done.

The one thing that has always annoyed me with installing ruby on Windows is that at some point in time I always need to setup the DevKit because I want to install gems that require native extensions. Also, I want the ability to switch between different versions of ruby.

As a publisher for a few Powershell modules I’m getting frustrated by the lack of standarization in the community on how to support versioning, deployment and conventions within Powershell module distribution. All I can find is rather adhoc mechanisms of sharing poorly written code with the “use at your own risk” kinds of disclaimers.

A few months ago I posted a simple tutorial on how to use Pester (a powershell bdd testing framework). I’m starting to practice the making of screencasts so I thought I would add some audio/visual to the blog post. I start rambling in the last 5 minutes so I won’t feel insulted if you stop paying attention after that part.

For a while now I’ve been waiting for something that can be as close to ruby gems as possible for PowerShell. For a while I thought Nuget was the way but it’s tight coupling to Visual Studio made it feel like it wasn’t quite the right fit for PowerShell.

Hi there and welcome to my demo of Pester, a BDD style testing framework for Powershell. The creation of Pester came out of the desire to test some build/deployment infrastructure we were creating for a project. We wrote nearly all the code without tests and it came to bite us in the end. I wanted to find a way ensure these problems didn’t happen again as well as provide some code coverage to give new entrants to the codebase some confidence that they won’t break everything.

Think about how you get good at anything. What do you remember spending most of your time on? Most likely you spent the majority of your time messing things up and getting it wrong. Why are kids so quick at picking up new skills, especially dangerous ones? It’s because kids are fearless experimenters. I’m currently learning how to skate and ski and my ability to learn is hindered by my concern of hurting myself; potentially preventing me from working and earning a living. I want to try and correlate the idea of failure as a healthy activity in the road to expertise in the world of operations in the software world.

Looking back at 2010 I can’t say I did a good job of following through with my resolutions, but I believe I have a valid excuse! For the last 12 months I’ve been working more as a build/release specialist than a software developer. Anyways, here’s a rundown of what I didn’t accomplish last year: