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Good evening all,

Another weekend, another MeasureCamp. I was in Bratislava only a week ago indeed and I have just returned from Amsterdam where I have presented a new deck on Powershell. Now that should be something not many of you are familiar with but you really should. I got into Powershell only last December and I have been whenever I had a bit of spare time on my hands during my working hours. For several months I kept asking the devs how to simply unzip a file from MS-DOS and perform checks on Adobe Dynamic Tag Manager (DTM) config files. Nobody seemed to know. And at around the same time, I was looking at the tech skills required for Data Engineering folks and Powershell was pretty high up the list. I had only the vaguest of ideas of what Powershell was, some kind of MS-DOS on steroids, boy oh boy how right I was! Then my work laptop started showing a Powershell window whenever I booted it up in the morning so I knew that it was installed on my machine. In fact, it's preinstalled on all Windows machines. Sorry Mac lovers, but you can automate tasks in a similar fashion using Bash.

So to boil things down many tasks we do are some variant of a very small number of generic tasks. If you could decouple the logic from the parameters that make the task at hand different then code taking care of the logic would, after a few iterations, remain the same and not change much unless your business process changed significantly. NASA in the 80s decided to switch from rockets to shuttles. You could only use rockets once but you could reuse a shuttle. I am proposing to use Powershell to build that metaphorical shuttle. In my deck below I am taking through a Powershell code example that starts Internet Explorer, loads a page and manipulates the form on that page. This code example also includes Javascript and even jQuery code embedded inside the Powershell script. I am thinking about creating a GitHub repo of Powershell code examples. A like-minded chap presented at another conference in England called BrightonSEO a few days ago on Powershell as well. I have reached out to him to propose to contribute to that Powershell repo. Keep your eyes peeled for the link to that repo as it does not exist yet. But for now here's the link to my MeasureCamp Amsterdam session:

https://www.slideshare.net/AlbanGrme/automating-boring-tasks-with-powershell

Thanks,

Alban
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