Day 3 – Introduction
Wait, the introduction on day three? How does that make any sense?!
The response on my idea to develop a #PowerShell Learning Log/Diary where I track my progress and learnings was really great. A lot of people encouraged me to take this path, so I’ve decided that a learning diary is a little bit more than just a tweet about what’s happening inside my head.
Learning is a serious thing for me, so I’ve decided to think about it for a bit (am I just procrastrinating to avoid actually learn something new right now? 😂) and want to clear a few things out first:
- What is my experience so far? What did I already know about this?
- Why am I even doing this? Where am I aiming at?
- What materials am I going to use?
- What am I learning in one specific lesson?
- My experience so far
1. My Experience
I have zero experience. I have never worked a an Admin nore have I ever used a scripting language before. I haven’t even learned something IT related. I’m a trained pedagogue, translating between IT guys and user. I’m working as a Microsoft 365 consultant, focusing on Change Management and User Adoption. Naturally I’m growing more and more into the IT world.
To be fair here, my father taught me how to navigate in the DOS system ages ago. Recently I’ve started to learn to write HTML and CSS, and I had one JavaScript class and that’s about it.
2. My Motivation
Why the hell am I even doing this? As I said, I’m working as a IT consultant and I love to learn. Even if it’s as far out of my comfortzone as PowerShell is. As I’m growing more and more into the IT world I want to understand the things my counterpart is doing. If I’m in a User Adoption project we usually talk about lots of things, even technical ones and there is an admin who’s doing all this IT magic in the background. Since I want to understand and talk to those people in a better way, I want to learn how this is doing. Furthermore I’ve stumbled upon cmdlets multiple times in different MSFT certifications and now I want to know what this is and how it works.
Also it’s a great way to learn a new skill that may help me with giving me a new perspective on obstacles and on how to overcome them.
3. My Ressources
Well I do have an udemy course by Mark Long which seems to be helpful, yet I had the feeling that it aims to an audience which has a little bit more background experience. So I discovered Don Jones, who published the ebook “PowerShell 4N00bs” and has a youtube series of short videos “Learn Windows PowerShell in a Month of Lunches”. Especially the book caught my attention, since when there is a n00b on this topic, it’s me.
Despite that my most helpful resource is the immeasurable source of beautiful people on Twitter and LinkedIn. The PowerShell online community is so heartwarming, happy to share experiences and knowledge and always eager to help, that it literally blew my mind. Kudos to all of you!
4. My Learnings
Well I searched around and found a few helpful templates. Here is one that seem okay. I will try and use it for a couple of time.
If it works: yay 🎉; if not: changing and adapting it 🔁
Learning Diary Template
- What lesson am I going to do today?
- What’s my reaction?
- What have I learned?
- What am I going to do next?
What do you think? Anything to share, add, comment on? I’m happy if you share your thoughts on the socials
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