Following up on yesterday’s post reviewing my progress on goals from 2016, I thought I’d try to set out some goals for the new year. I’m going to group them into 3 groups: Technology, Community, and Content.

Content Goals

Write 100 posts. I didn’t do so well with this last year, but this year will be different. I’m not sure why I don’t write more often. I enjoy writing and feel good about myself when I do it. I’m going to try to be consistent with it as well, not having several months with no posts. Write a book. I’ve written a couple of books with a publisher (here and here) and I think that was valuable experience. I’m going to try to do it on my own. That should enable me to keep the cost down. I’m also going to try to do it a lot quicker (and maybe shorter) than the other books. BTW…I’ve already started. Write a course. I love to teach PowerShell, and I’ve got a lot of practice doing it at work. I’m considering recording “lectures” for a course (like on Udemy). Edit/Contribute 50 topics on StackOverflow.com’s Documentation project for PowerShell. It seems like a reasonable platform for information about PowerShell, and there are already a bunch of topics there ready to be filled in.

Community Goals

Start a regional PSUG in Southwest Missouri. I live there, so it’s silly for me to have to drive 3 hours to go to a user group meeting. I don’t intend to stop going to those long-distance meetings altogether, but there are a lot of people in SWMO who don’t have a group. Continue Speaking. If they’ll have me, I plan to continue speaking at local or regional user groups. I’m also looking for “nearby” SQL Saturdays, PowerShell Saturdays, or other settings. Continue the UG and teaching at work. This one is pretty easy, but I don’t want to get distracted and let these fall apart.

Technology Goals

Get handy with DSC and/or Chef. I’m still scripting virtualization/provisioning “manually” (i.e. scripting the steps I’d do manually) rather than using a system to do that for me. I wanted to do it that way so I would understand what goes on, but now that I know, I want to be out of that business. DSC is almost certain to be part of the equation. Chef might be, but that’s an open question (also, Packer, Vagrant, Ansible, etc.) Deploy operational tests with Pester/PoshSpec/OVF. I see a lot of promise with these, but everything is single-machine focused. Something like this looks like a good start, but needs some flexibility. Nano, Containers, (flavor of the month). This one is kind of a wildcard. These two (nano and containers) are new technology solutions that I understand at a surface level, but don’t have a good idea why or where I would use them. I’m not sure if I’ll dig into one of these two or something else that pops up in the year, but there will be an in-depth project.

Bonus Goal

If I can get good with DSC, I really want to be able to spin up an entire environment from scratch. By that, I mean from scripts (and downloaded ISOs) I want to be able to create a DC (with certificate services) and a DSC pull server, and then deploy the servers for a lab and have them configure themselves via the pull server. For more of a bonus, use the newly created certificate services server to handle the passwords properly in the DSC configs. By the way, I’m aware of Lability and PS-AutoLab-Env. They’re both awesome but not quite what I’m looking for here.

Those ought to keep me busy for the year. What are you planning to do/share/learn this year? Write about it and post a link in the comments!

–Mike