Hello everyone, we haven’t met yet. My name is Jeremy Clore and I’m a Sr. Systems Support Specialist with the server team here at Quixtar. I was a little surprised by this opportunity to share a fun story with you. As you can imagine it takes a lot of servers to run the websites that support our business initiatives. When we need to make a change that affects a farm of servers, automation is critical to managing that change efficiently and consistently. I have used scripting to automate many aspects of our server build process, manage change and automate tasks in a terminal server farm that I built for our customer service department.
Last year, as many scripters know, Microsoft released a new (scriptable) command shell called PowerShell. While I was out on the
Microsoft Script Center website searching for some information regarding the syntax of the new features of PowerShell, I stumbled across an event called the 2007 Scripting Games. This would be the 2nd annual Scripting Games. In these games, scripters compete for, well… nothing! It’s an online event that Microsoft has to promote scripting and the scripting community. I decided that competition would be a great way to motivate myself to learn the new syntax quickly and I entered the PowerShell advanced division. Also, it seemed like a fun way to improve my skill set and stay warm during some of our cold Michigan winter evenings in February. Recently, I received an email from Microsoft asking for a bio that they could include in something they had setup called “Profiles in Perfection” featuring competitors who achieved perfect scores. I’ll follow up and post a comment when the bio is up there.
I’ve always enjoyed solving puzzles and pretty much anything that challenged my problem solving ability, which is probably how I ended up in a technical field. I was encouraged to share my experience participating in the Scripting Games here on the Code Review blog. Well, I haven’t really blogged before so I decided to review some of the content prior to posting. It’s not always obvious when loading a server or automating a process what impact a “techie” like me can actually have on the business. It is, however, obvious to me what an impact a successful business can have on our IBOs. Usually, a few times per year, we have large groups of IBOs visit our Quixtar facility. We form a large greeting line to meet them at the entrance of the building. It’s a rewarding experience to see how happy our IBO community is when they visit us here at Quixtar. Of the goals we have here, I think that helping our IBOs achieve success faster stands out to me. Even if I play a relatively small part in that with the work that I do, I feel a sense of great accomplishment. As I reviewed the comments on our Code Review blog and noticed the feedback from our IBOs it really energized me. It’s great to have a site like this and to see the interaction between our IBOs and Quixtar IT.
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