Welcome to episode 123 of the Nerd Journey Podcast [@NerdJourney]! We’re John White (@vJourneyman) and Nick Korte (@NetworkNerd_), two Pre-Sales Technical Engineers who are hoping to bring you the IT career advice that we wish we’d been given earlier in our careers. In today’s episode we share part 1 of our interview with Josh Duffney and discuss his early career progression through learning PowerShell, participating in technical communities, becoming a PluralSight author, and making an interesting transition from Systems Administration to DevOps Engineering.
Original Recording Date: 05-03-2021
Topics – Early Career, Learning PowerShell, Community Participation, PluralSight Author, Sacrifice, Systems Administrator to DevOps Engineer
2:44 – Meet Josh Duffney

* Josh Duffney is a Content Developer for Microsoft. He writes content on docs.microsoft.com and focuses on Ansible, Terraform, PowerShell, and Azure CLI.

* Josh works with a Product Manager for each technology stack mentioned. Some of the documentation is based on customer feedback, but there is also a great deal of freedom to shape the content roadmap.
* Josh has been with Microsoft for about 4 months. In the last month, he has spent time doing analysis of documentation in the Ansible space as it relates to Azure.
* Josh works with Product Managers and Technical Writers and can think of his writing beyond a blog post series and more from an information architecture standpoint.
* Content development is still development. They use software development principles to build and release documentation. Instead of building infrastructure, Josh is building documentation.

5:53 – Early Career and Learning PowerShell

* Nick and Josh crossed paths originally in the Spiceworks community.
* At a previous employer, Josh was working on a disk space report which his manager expected daily at 8 AM via e-mail.

* The server in question ran everything for the business including e-mail, print services, and acted as a domain controller. Josh had to login to the server daily to pull the needed information to put in his report.
* Josh saw this as a mundane task and vented to the Spiceworks community. Someone suggested he script the task and run it on a schedule, which worked great.

* After seeing he could do so much work with code, Josh was interested PowerShell.

* Josh then transitioned to working at a large construction company near where he lived in Bellevue, Nebraska.

* He was part of a large help desk team and deemed one of the two "script kids."
* The team would often get tickets that involved making changes for hundreds of users at a time. Writing scripts made this much easier and sharpened Josh’s skills.
* In previous roles Josh was a one man department and didn’t get enough repetitive tasks for a good handle on scripting.
* The script kid title was a slang appreciative term for what Josh and his teammate saved the tier 2 team in terms of workload. There was no specific direction on what they should automate, but they jumped at anything and everything they could touch with PowerShell (Active Directory, Sharepoint, etc.).
* The help desk team was the ingress of technology related tickets for the entire company. The level 1 and level 2 teams would handle whatever they could and escalate to other dedicated teams when needed.