PSConfEU is the “Europe’s largest PowerShell-themed annual conference!”. It covers a lot of different topics and brings professionals from all over the world.
“In 2020, we’ll have 350 delegate seats again and 40 international speakers”
It has talks about DSC, PowerShell internals, Azure, DevOps, IoT and many other areas.
This conference is simply amazing and I’m really happy to announce that I will be speaking! Last year was my first time attending and speaking at a conference outside my country, and PSConfEU was the one. I couldn’t ask for a better experience. Let me share my experience with you, specially if you are a newcomer.
Why PSConfEU 🔗
It all started as a joke/challenge/objective two years ago, when there were people posting about #sadJoey. At some point, I replied to Tyler (b|t) on Twitter saying that we would be going on the next year. In December the CFP opened and I decided to submit two sessions about PowerShell IoT and, to my surprise, I’ve got accepted.
The other reason is that I’ve been to Germany once and really loved it, so it was a perfect excuse to go back.
The environment 🔗
Other than this conference, I’ve only been in conferences in my hometown (Lisbon), such as SQLPort, SQLSaturday and TugaIT. Although the environment on those conferences is really good, there’s something special about PSConfEU. It might be because it was the first (and only so far) conference that I’ve attended outside my country. It’s also much bigger, not only in time (5 days) but in attendees as well. Also, it’s related to an area that I feel more comfortable with.
Before attending to the conference, I think I can count by my hands how many people I knew that were going to be there too (and if we consider those that I’ve met in person, 1 hand is enough), and I’m only talking about the speakers. As you might imagine (and if you are a speaker you might have been through it as well), it’s fascinating and terrifying at the same time. I’ve always heard that people at conferences are really amazing and friendly, but never expected such engagement. Now I need more than both of my hands to count the people I’ve keep contact with.
Let me be honest… I kind of had the idea that it would be “clustered”, by having different groups of people that already knew each other, and the “celebrities” were just going to be a group and it would be really hard to feel integrated. Sure there were groups of people, but as far as I’ve noticed, not those groups that just talk to each other and don’t speak to anyone else.
Narrator: he was totally wrong.
Now that I’m writing this, and after being there, I feel bad that I even thought that way.
Let me put it this way: I, someone who knows “nothing” about PowerShell when compared to probably most of the other folks, talked to Jeffrey Snover(b|t), Bruce Payette(t), Lee Holmes(b|t), Steve Lee(t), among many other “celebrities” like we already knew each other. And most of the time we didn’t even talked about PowerShell, but also about other companies, tech, career progress, music, etc.
The point that I’m trying to make is that if you have a similar thought like I did, just don’t. It’s such a friendly and welcoming community that you don’t have to be afraid of not feeling integrated, or that the others are way better than you (yes I’m talking to you people with the Imposters’ Syndrome). Everyone that I spoke to talked to me like we already knew each other and in a really kind way, even though I’m sure most of them never heard of me before. But there was something that surprised me: I’ve had people coming to me like “oh you are the raspberry and IoT guy”, or “I’m really excited about your sessions!” and (maybe the best) “For me, your sessions were some of the best ones this year”.
With that said, one of the things that enjoy the most are not the sessions. It is what happens between them and, specially, at the end of the day. Everything I’ve just shared with you happened between sessions, after a day of sessions, at dinner or at the hotel’s bar. You get to talk with so many people with different cultures, different habits, that have a career that’s totally different than yours, and that’s really amazing to hear and share.
The sessions 🔗
This year there will be 3 tracks and from 5 to 7 “time slots”. This means that there will be from 15 to 21 sessions per day! You can already check the schedule. Although it’s subject to changes, you can see the sessions that will be presented.
What I’ll be speaking about 🔗
This year I’ll do two sessions again, one still related to PowerShell IoT, and another about C# for PowerShellers.
PowerShell IoT v2 - What’s new, what changed and what I’ve learned 🔗
As the abstract of the session says:
PowerShell.IoT is a free, Open Source module that allows you to interact with IoT hardware. Since I’ve become a maintainer of this repo, I’ve been working to migrate the code to use System.Devices from the dotnet team. In this session, I will share with you what has changed, what’s new, and what I’ve learned since I’ve started to contribute to Open Source software, and also why you should too!
You can expect a session with demos, new concepts, which decisions where made, why and how they were made, some C# content, what I’ve learned so far from contributing to an Open Source project.
C# For PowerShellers - Why is it any good for you 🔗
Quoting the session’s abstract:
Last year, a chart showed that the vast majority of PSConfEU attendees either don’t know C# or don’t use it. Coming from a C# background this shocked me since got familiar with PowerShell because I know C#. This session introduces C#, how to write a cmdlet, different ways to load your code into PowerShell, why is that some cmdlets are written in PowerShell and many other concepts!
This session became a reality after last year, also at PSConfEU, Tobias(b|t) showed a chart stating that most of the attendees either didn’t know C# or didn’t like it/wanted to use it. The purpose of this session is to try to demystify that C# is a “monster” and it’s really hard to use with PowerShell. Although it’s different from PowerShell, it has many similarities, and most importantly, they use the same Framework. For that reason, I think that I will be able to show that you already know a lot of C#, you just don’t know yet!
Thanks for reading and I hope that you consider attending to this session, and if you do, please come say hi!