The PowerShell and DevOps Global Summit 2024 Debrief

This year I had the pleasure of speaking at the PowerShell and DevOps Global Summit and catching up with a few attendees during the day. I wanted to share my experiences of the event and my talks.

Speaking for me is a double-edged sword. I genuinely love speaking and interacting with the audience during my talks. I love sharing knowledge with other people. But on the other side, I spend a lot of time in the hotel practising my talks. So I don’t see as many sessions, or people, as I’d like.

This year was particularly bad for that. So while I caught up with a small group people in the evenings, I barely saw anybody during the day.

However, the tweaking and practising paid off, and I did feel I gave two talks I am very proud of.

I did spend a lot of my time with the Chocolatey Team, meeting Cory, Ryan and Tyler for the first time, and catching up with James, Josh and Stevie again.

Comparing WinGet and Chocolatey: A Real-World Look at Package Management Tools

This was an updated version of the talk I presented at PSConf EU in 2023, updated for 2024 with new content. This talk went really well and feedback from the audience during the talk was good. A few people pointed out that they learned some new things about both products, and the anonymous feedback after the event was good. Really pleased with how this had gone.

WinRM vs. OpenSSH: A Showdown for PowerShell Remoting

In contrast to my first talk this, did not go so well. Switching from slides to my demo caused resolution issues on the room screen causing me to do a lot of scrolling and move things around. When we did get back to the slides, the resolution issues continued. But worse!

And just to add to the pressure, the maintainer of OpenSSH was in the audience! But they did offer an explanation as to why all the recent releases were betas. I spoke to him afterwards, and he was very kind about my talk and content.

While what could go wrong, did go wrong, this was one of the best talks I had given. The interaction with the audience was fantastic. We laughed, I almost cried, we laughed some more. A genuinely fantastic experience for me, and I hope for the audience.

To the one person who left anonymous feedback saying I should have been “better prepared” I absolutely assure you I practised this talk many times. But not on the big screen at the event, as that wasn’t possible. I feel Linux, and more specifically X11, let me down here when switching resolutions.

So while I’ve talked about disasters and mayhem above, if you were not there you’ll have missed it all. The awesome AV team cleared it all up in the video edit!!

Summary

PowerShell Summit was a mixed bag for me. But it was of my own making. The time I spent with the attendees was great. The talks went well. Everybody was very kind and generous with their time. It’s an event that I’d like to dive deeper into and perhaps next time not be so hotel-bound with my talks.

Thanks to the organisers, sponsors and attendees for making the event special.

And a huge thank you to the AV person for their words at the end of my last talk. You know who you are. Your words were very kind and genuinely humbling and meant a great deal to me.