The PowerShell Podcast

Andrew Pla sits down with TJ Turner at Microsoft’s TechMentor conference @ Microsoft HQ in Redmond, Washington, for a conversation about PowerShell, career growth, and the parts of working in IT that don’t show up in the documentation. TJ traces his path from infrastructure through K-12, finance, and retail to his current role as a Cloud Evangelist at TD SYNNEX, along with his early days using PowerShell v2 and v3, competing in the Scripting Games, and helping start the Philadelphia PowerShell User Group. They also dig into real-world automation wins, including a PowerShell workflow that helped validate thousands of systems before a holiday weekend, plus burnout, community, asking for help, and what years of broken demos and IT mistakes can teach you about staying prepared and learning to adapt.

Key Takeaways:
· What got you here won’t get you there. TJ’s career moved from hands-on infrastructure into distribution, cloud, and technical evangelism, and none of those moves were necessarily part of the original plan. Staying open to new roles, skills, and opportunities has been a big part of that growth.
· PowerShell changes how you think, not just how you work. TJ shares examples of using PowerShell to validate thousands of systems, automate VMware update workflows, and collect detailed system state information. Over time, that automation mindset became part of how he approaches problems, even as his career moved beyond day-to-day infrastructure work.
· Community and communication are technical skills too. Whether it’s recognizing burnout, asking for help, meeting someone at a conference, or admitting you don’t know an answer during a presentation, the ability to connect with other people can have just as much impact on your career as knowing the technology.

Guest Bio:
TJ Turner is a Cloud Evangelist at TD SYNNEX, one of Microsoft’s largest distributors in the CSP and partner channel. His background is in infrastructure, with experience spanning K-12, financial services, retail, and other enterprise environments. TJ got started with PowerShell during the v2 and v3 era, competed in the Scripting Games, and helped found the Philadelphia PowerShell User Group. Today, his work includes Azure, Microsoft 365, security, GitHub, DevOps, and helping partners grow their businesses.

Resource Links:
· TD SYNNEX Microsoft Partner Programs: https://www.tdsynnex.com/na/us/Microsoft/

· PDQ Connect PowerShell Scanner: https://www.pdq.com/powershell-scanner/

· PDQ PowerShell Scanner Blog Post: https://www.pdq.com/blog/the-powershell-scanner-has-arrived-in-pdq-connect/

· PDQ Community PowerShell Scanners Repository: https://github.com/pdqcom/PowerShell-Scanners

· TJ Turner on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?keywords=TJ+Turner+TD+SYNNEX

The PowerShell Podcast on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ce9vxdkzDbo

• PSModuleDevelopment makes spinning up a new, fully scaffolded PowerShell module a one-liner – complete with tests, GitHub release pipelines, and PowerShell Gallery publishing – so you can focus entirely on the actual functions you need to write.
• PSFramework handles the infrastructure layer of your code (logging, configuration, tab completion, parameter validation, retry logic) so you stop reinventing the wheel and your projects stay consistent across years and teammates.
• The real payoff of a shared framework is long-term maintainability: Fred opened a module he hadn't touched in six years and had a bug fixed and released in five minutes because everything was exactly where he expected it to be.

• PSFramework Project Home: https://psframework.org/
• PSFramework on GitHub: https://github.com/PowershellFrameworkCollective/psframework
• PSModuleDevelopment on GitHub: https://github.com/PowershellFrameworkCollective/PSModuleDevelopment
• PSUtil on GitHub: https://github.com/PowershellFrameworkCollective/PSUtil
• PowerShell Framework Collective on GitHub: https://github.com/PowershellFrameworkCollective/
• PDQ Discord – PowerShell Scripting Channel: https://discord.gg/pdq
• The PowerShell Podcast on YouTube:https://youtu.be/sZQdgBZM75Y

• The most common Active Directory escalation paths are not sophisticated. Over-permissioned accounts with ACL chains to DC sync, exposed certificate authorities, and unencrypted backup tapes are consistently the entry points attackers exploit. If you can find these first, you are already ahead of most threat actors.
• Tier isolation done right requires both authentication policies and user rights assignment policies working together. Either technique alone leaves a blind spot that a determined attacker can walk through.
• Cybersecurity is a team sport, and bad cybersecurity is too. Microsoft ships AD with questionable defaults, vendors demand domain admin for service accounts, and administrators make shortcuts under pressure. The fix is not one heroic hardening sprint; it is a culture of least privilege built into every decision from the start.

• ADMF follows a test-before-apply model borrowed from DSC, but trades DSC's all-or-nothing enforcement for a more selective, component-by-component approach that better fits the fluid reality of Active Directory management.
• Generating a configuration from an existing AD environment is tempting but potentially counterproductive. If you auto-generate your desired state from a domain that's accumulated years of cruft, you're not capturing what you want, you're just freezing what already exists.
• Performance at scale is a real consideration. The built-in Active Directory PowerShell module uses the AD Web Services protocol, which sends XML over the wire. Raw LDAP is significantly faster, and Fred says switching to it is the one architectural change he'd make if building ADMF over again.

• Stepper has gotten some meaningful quality-of-life updates since Jake last appeared on the show, including named steps, automatic logging, and the ability to suppress secrets from logs — making it more practical for real-world production scripts.
• PSConf EU punches above its weight as a conference experience: technically deep but genuinely welcoming at every skill level, with none of the elitism that can creep into security-adjacent events.
• Your vacation time is a benefit, not a backlog item. Jake makes the case that getting good at separating your work time from your off time isn't a soft skill — it's a sustainability practice.

• Jake Hildreth's Website: jakehildreth.com
• Jake's GitHub: github.com/jakehildreth
• Stepper (Resumable PowerShell Scripts): github.com/jakehildreth/Stepper
• Locksmith (AD CS Auditing & Remediation): github.com/jakehildreth/Locksmith
• Locksmith 2 (Next-Gen AD CS Toolkit): github.com/jakehildreth/…
• PowerShell Conference Europe: psconf.eu
• PDQ Discord: discord.gg/PDQ
• The PowerShell Podcast on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Rqkuaeps_jM

• Pester isn't just for unit testing your functions -- it scales all the way up to testing live infrastructure, validating Azure environments, and serving as the backbone of security tools like Maester. The more you invest in it, the more useful it gets.
• AI-generated code needs a safety net, and Pester is exactly that. Testing gives sysadmins a way to verify what the code is actually doing, which is especially critical when you didn't write it yourself.
• Imposter syndrome is almost universal in this community, and the people who feel it most are often the ones learning the most. Getting into community spaces -- online or in person -- is one of the fastest ways to grow.

Guest Bio:
Robert Prüst is a Microsoft MVP and MCT based in the Netherlands, focused on PowerShell, Azure automation, and DevOps. He has around 24 years of professional IT experience and has been working with PowerShell since roughly 2012. Robert is a regular speaker at PSConf EU, blogs at powershellpr0mpt.com, and is active on GitHub under the handle powershellpr0mpt. He runs a custom Azure Engineer bootcamp course and contributes to open source projects including the AMBA and EPAC frameworks.

Resource Links:

•  Pester documentation: https://pester.dev
•  Maester: https://maester.dev
•  PSKoans: https://github.com/vexx32/PSKoans
•  PSConfEU: https://psconf.eu
•  PDQ Discord: https://discord.gg/pdq
• Connect with Andrew: https://andrewpla.tech/links
• Robert’s blog: https://powershellpr0mpt.com
• Robert on GitHub: https://github.com/powershellpr0mpt
• Robert on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rprust/
• The PowerShell Podcast on YouTube: https://youtu.be/7Z2Pk0y2Xss

Dan Adams is a 13-year Microsoft 365 and SharePoint veteran who joined Andrew to talk about the often misunderstood world of SharePoint, the shift to Microsoft Graph, and his custom PowerShell module built which can assess and benchmark M365 environments. Dan breaks down why SharePoint gets such a bad reputation (spoiler: it's usually about who built it, not the platform), explains why "everything in M365 is SharePoint" isn't just a meme, and digs into how the Microsoft Graph API is changing the way admins interact with the platform. He also shares his experience going from longtime podcast listener to first-time guest, and closes with some honest advice about reaching out to people in the community.

Key Takeaways:

• SharePoint's bad reputation often comes from poor initial architecture, not the platform itself. Getting the information structure right at the start has downstream effects on everything from Copilot to Purview to legal compliance, and PowerShell automation is only as useful as the metadata you've set up to work with.
• The Microsoft Graph API is consolidating how everything in M365 is accessed. Where older APIs like the SharePoint client-side object model might count a batch of 100 items as 100 separate API calls, Graph treats that same batch as a single call, which is a meaningful difference for performance and rate limiting.
• Dan's custom PowerShell module (SP’r Smash Bros Automation) automates M365 permission extraction to produce security assessments against CIS benchmarks and Microsoft Secure Score. Built as a practical tool for consultants and admins, it delivers a fast, standardized baseline of a tenant's security posture, featuring an optional AI sidecar to instantly generate personalized remediation plans.
  
  Guest Bio:
  
  Dan Adams is a Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Architect with 13 years of M365 consulting experience. Leveraging deep SharePoint and strategic information architecture expertise, he has led teams to deliver over 40 Fortune 500 intranets across industries ranging from healthcare to the NFL. He is the architect behind multiple award-winning portals, including two Ragan "Best Overall Intranet" winners. Dan is also an AI enthusiast, an advanced PowerShell expert, and the creator of the custom "SP'r Smash Bros Automation" module for Microsoft 365.
  
  Resource Links:
• Dan Adams on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-adams-10887650/
• Dan Adams on Github: https://github.com/sprsmashbrosautomation
• Connect with Andrew: https://andrewpla.tech/links
• PnP PowerShell: https://pnp.github.io/powershell/
• PDQ Discord Community: https://discord.gg/pdq
• The PowerShell Podcast on YouTube: https://youtu.be/OLsTaKC9GmM
• PowerShell Wednesday Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQT8lrn8hhU&list=PL1mL90yFExsix-L0havb8SbZXoYRPol0B

Encore presentation: Lessons in Leadership from PowerShell Pioneers Jeffrey Snover and Don Jones 

In this encore presentation of the PowerShell Podcast from April 28, 2025, we sit down with two legends of the PowerShell world: Jeffrey Snover, the inventor of PowerShell, and Don Jones, bestselling author, teacher, and longtime PowerShell community builder. Recorded live at the PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit, this conversation is packed with personal insights, impactful moments, and the kind of storytelling that only Snover and Jones can deliver.  

 Key topics in this episode include:  

•  The origin stories of PowerShell and how Jeffrey and Don’s paths crossed at a pivotal moment.  

• The evolution of PowerShell as a scripting language, community, and ecosystem.  

• The importance of storytelling in tech, from teaching to team-building to leadership.  

• The shift from individual contributor to leader and how both hosts navigated that path with intention.  

• The power of community: real stories from users whose lives were changed by learning PowerShell.  

• Career advice for the next generation of IT professionals and community contributors.  

Along the way, we hear hilarious stories from the early days of PowerShell development, honest reflections on growth and failure, and powerful reminders that vulnerability, repetition, and kindness are core to success in any career. Whether you're new to PowerShell or a long-time community member, this episode is a true masterclass in leadership, learning, and legacy.  

Bio and links:  

Jeffrey Snover is the inventor of PowerShell, Microsoft Technical Fellow, and a legendary figure in the IT and DevOps communities. With a background in distributed systems, Jeffrey led the development of PowerShell to revolutionize system management and automation on Windows. Known for his visionary leadership and storytelling, Jeffrey has played a pivotal role in shaping modern IT practices. His work continues to inspire technologists around the world to build, share, and lead with intention and clarity.  

Don Jones is a bestselling author, speaker, educator, and one of the most influential figures in the PowerShell community. With decades of experience in IT, Don has written numerous foundational books on PowerShell, including Learn Windows PowerShell in a Month of Lunches. He co-founded the PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit and has mentored countless professionals through his teaching, writing, and leadership. Don is a passionate advocate for storytelling in tech, career development, and building inclusive communities that empower the next generation.  

Resource links:  

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreysnover/  

https://www.linkedin.com/in/concentrateddon/  

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewplatech/  

https://www.powershellsummit.org/  

The PowerShell Podcast: https://pdq.com/the-powershell-podcast  

The PowerShell Podcast on YouTube: https://youtu.be/51w_lWFIfqU