Working in a large organisation, you quickly realise how desperate you can get to automate. The repetitive tasks can get a little too repetitive! Or at least to me it was. As most people imagine about government jobs, before I started in the role, 75% of the tasks were processed manually. And as such, mistakes often happened or steps were missed.
So I used my time to write PowerShell modules to ensure that the tasks happened the same way every time. Starting out with basic things, like the disabling process, moving on to running reports on sections of the environment.
With recent changes in the design of the network, previous processes no longer applied, and it was only the ease and flexibility of the modification of the module and individual scripts that kept us from going back to manual tasks.
As such, you will see a big focus on PowerShell solutions where possible in any Windows sysadmin problems written about on this website. With Microsoft spending more time and focus on PowerShell and non GUI based administration, or remote administration, it really is best to get on board to automate all the things via scripts and modules.
While a lot of my code is proprietary to the organisation (designed to our exact environment), where the code is generic, I have placed it on my personal GitHub repo.
Where possible, I also use Chocolatey to script installs of software. However not everything has a Chocolatey script, and some are out of date.
Cover photo courtesy of @markusspiske on Unsplash
