Lets Automate It

from Josh Rickard

Python vs Powershell Part 1: Versioning

I posted a tweet earlier this week asking if anyone would be interested in a small series of posts that explain the differences between Python and PowerShell. So, here we go! Python on macOS Python and PowerShell are quite a bit different from each other. Python has been around for several years and works on multiple operating systems. Additionally, Python is beloved by it’s extremely supportive open-source community; rightfully so! Python is fast and portable, and is a go to for most developers. Continue reading

Using Amazon SNS With Powershell

Simple Notification Service (SNS) from Amazon Web Services (AWS) can work in conjunction with AWS Simple Queue Service (SQS), Lambda Functions, HTTP APIs/endpoints, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3), and so on. As PowerShell continues to gain attraction with IT professionals around the globe, you can use SNS along with other services to create powerful applications to help your business win. Amazon SNS lets your application deliver notifications to additional services or applications, depending on your use case. Continue reading

Using Amazon Sqs With Powershell

Amazon SQS is a flexible queue service that has many uses cases, from scalable web applications and processing systems to inter-application communications. This is useful if you need to process lots of data at once or have threads or workers to do a specific action to a large pool of data. With the explosion of use cases for PowerShell and Docker in production systems, you can easily scale using queue systems like Amazon SQS. Continue reading

Traverse Local Certificate Store With Powershell

Windows Certificate Store is typically accessed using the MMC Snap-In, You can view both the Computer or User certificate stores using a traditional MMC console. Sometimes though, you may just want to programmatically access it using PowerShell. Luckily you can do this using a PSDrive that is created on your machine. As you can see there is a Cert drive and you can access it using PowerShell’s multiple location based Cmdlets. Continue reading

Powershell Console, Scripts, Functions, Modules, Cmdlets, Oh My!

PowerShell is unique, but it is also necessary in today’s world. I find that newcomers to the language are sometimes confused or don’t understand the basic layers of PowerShell scripting. You can use PowerShell in different ways, but I have yet to find an all encompassing article that explains the high-level of how to interact with PowerShell in these different ways. This post will explain the different concepts (or layers) of PowerShell code organization and their main advantages and use cases. Continue reading

Using Github to Revive Blog Posts

I am currently migrating my blog content from Wordpress.com to GitHub pages using Hugo. During this transition, I wanted to have the ability to “revive” my blog posts on a scheduled basis on social media (e.g. Twitter). With Wordpress, you can use the WordPress Revive Old Posts plugin but with WordPress.com you have to have a premium business account to use plugins. If you’re in a similar situation of if you want a free way to automate the “re-posting” of your blog content then you’re in luck! Continue reading

Adding a Dlls Certificate to a Trusted Store

Yesterday I was asked to help with streamling a manual process that some QA folks were running into. They had a debug release of an applicaiton that was signed with a test code signing certificate. Part of the process was that they needed to select a DLL, view the certificate, and then install the certificate into the machines trusted certificate store. This is a extremely simple task, but it was just an annoyance, so I wrote a few lines of code to autoamte this for them. Continue reading