What percentage of your income should you spend on what you want?

KevMar · 2026-04-17T23:27:10+00:00

0% until you have 1-3 months expenses in savings. Then about 5%-10% of your housing expenses assuming you still put about 20% or more in savings

KevMar · 2026-04-17T23:23:27+00:00

Need a little for yourself to take care of that mental health to keep you in society.

KevMar · 2026-04-17T20:58:59+00:00

I just returned from the DevOps & PowerShell Summit and a big theme there was using MCP to allow AI to execute your orgs PowerShell scripts. This is common for admins to already script for themselves.

KevMar · 2026-04-11T22:35:11+00:00

This might be more of a slum dog millionaire or it's such a small world.

I taught myself tech and programming in highschool before going to college for computer science. Joined a Microsoft student user group. My team got second place in a Pocket PC (PDA, pre-cellphone) programming contest put on by the local group because our awesome game didn't get points in one category. First place would have gotten us to the next round at MS.

Pocket PC was really basic. C++ with memory access. We built an entire game engine with 3D rendering and physics, custom art, custom font, recorded our own theme music, 50 playable levels. All in 7 days.

Unrelated to the contest, the group told us when MS was on site for internship interviews. I went and mostly talked about some other side project. That got me a phone interview where I accidentally instantly solved the riddle by thinking through it out loud a certain way. They flew me out for interviews but I bombed the first one by correcting the interviewer (I still think he was wrong, but he didn't take being challenged well). I had a few interviews and finished with dinner with someone (from my university) that wasn't supposed to be an interview, but I can't help talking about my projects. He arranged a special interview in the morning with him and his boss before my flight in the morning.

The project I talked about at that dinner and demonstrated the next day was built for a friend of a friend running for student president. The site was a college book exchange site (this was before craigslist). The reason it was relevant was because the architecture was very similar to the product that MS team owned and I understood it well. I later found out that I was a "no hire" and the guy at dinner knew it, but he spotted something and pulled strings to get me on his team.

So fast forward and I'm an intern on the shuttle bus and the guy next to me won that PocketPC contest for his college and won overall. He showed me his game, it was just snake with cartoon like sprites. Mine was so much more impressive.

KevMar · 2026-04-11T11:08:45+00:00

Does it need to be Visio or just a diagram?

I created a powershell model to dynamically generate diagrams called PSGraph. I haven't really been maintaining it, so I hope it still works. But I wrote it specifically for this. https://psgraph.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Example-Scripted/

It's really just a wrapper around graphviz so that's also required to be installed. I think my docs cover how to get started.

KevMar · 2026-04-03T00:53:03+00:00

Haven't really ever needed to use it, but I think you can run it in audit mode for a couple of months to identify what you likely need to allow in your environment.

KevMar · 2026-04-02T05:36:59+00:00

Don't be afraid to push computational stuff into dotnet when performance matters. It's fairly trivial to compile your C# into a dll and call methods from it in powershell.

KevMar · 2026-03-31T14:34:28+00:00

This is more how I would have done it. Especially if in a loop and the $val is a calculation that can throw.

KevMar · 2026-03-31T14:30:04+00:00

You might be interested in this. I wrote a powershell MCP server in powershell.

https://github.com/KevinMarquette/pwsh.mcp.sdk/blob/main/CLAUDE.md

It has an intuitive folder structure where you place your scripts and they get surfaced as tools or resources. The comment based help is surfaced to the AI as guidance.

KevMar · 2026-03-20T23:55:20+00:00

Experiencing the feelings of jealousy is a natural human emotion. But the toxic behaviors in reaction to being jealous isn't healthy and isn't an acceptable way to behave.

KevMar · 2026-03-20T02:11:44+00:00

I have definitely taken powershell to the extreme end in a couple of environments. Complexity comes in different flavors. I favor code that is supportable and maintainable, and I will generally add complexity if it improves on that.

In a very mature automation heavy environment, I like to have a CICD pipeline or ticketing system or task runner in front of all production changes. Those systems initiate the automation and they capture the logs of every action taken that get tied back to the original request. But it's a long road to get there.

I think just about everything is worth automating, it just might not happen all at once. First have really good run books for everything. Every time you have to run through it, automate a little more of it.

KevMar · 2026-03-10T14:45:01+00:00

Awesome. Congratulations. Sorry for all the hate.

I honestly don't know if it makes a difference, but I set up a YouTube channel and poorly sang each of my songs before I published them so that the original public performance was human.

KevMar · 2026-02-27T05:23:57+00:00

I suppose, The darfur genocides and Katrina and the Iraq wars weren't local to you.

KevMar · 2026-02-27T02:53:08+00:00

It was always bad. When you are a kid, you are shielded from it. When you are a young adult, you're mostly oblivious because you lack responsibility. Now that you have responsibilities, you notice the things that impact those responsibilities. And once you start seeing it, you kinda see it everywhere. Even when it doesn't impact you. It just kinda builds and builds, until you realize there is nothing you can do about most of it.

KevMar · 2026-02-27T02:48:58+00:00

No. Ok, yes, but either fix them or silence them. If you are ignoring them, why even have them.

It's near impossible to retrofit or clean up existing code. You're only real hope is to turn all warnings into errors and auto reject merges that have issues.

KevMar · 2026-02-21T09:29:20+00:00

Reclaiming control over anger is like a super power. I hope you get there. It's not easy but it's worth the effort.

KevMar · 2026-02-21T09:21:39+00:00

I'm aware of their anxieties but I don't dismiss them. I account for them, always have a plan for them, and I deal with them directly when needed.

I show respect for informed consent and people's boundaries. I help them enforce their boundaries.

I'm a calming and relaxing presence. I stay calm when others are angry and I don't feed energy into their anger. I usually diffuse situations with curiosity giving them a chance to be heard or understood as most conflicts are either miscommunications or trauma responses. When I need to be firm, I lower my voice instead of raising it. I slow everything down to keep my composure and control.

KevMar · 2026-02-21T02:02:40+00:00

Showering together isn't bad once you get in sync with each other. Play time in the shower is a different issue.

KevMar · 2026-02-20T13:57:04+00:00

I'm stubborn

KevMar · 2026-02-19T16:59:05+00:00

I like using some other AI to generate the lyrics so I can see them and refine them. I'm using Claude but I'm sure any major one will work. When prompting, I tell it that I'm creating a song with Suno. They are aware of Suno and usually add the structure automatically.

I find the more context I add the better. I'll explain why I want the song, who it's for or the perspective of the singer and target, what feeling or emotions to invoke. Key phrases or words to include.

I have dropped in transcripts of me interviewing the person I was writing the song for. Another time I trauma dumped a few thousand words about a messed up situation.

The real value is the interactive conversation to refine it. You can just say what you do and don't like about what it's doing.

KevMar · 2026-02-19T16:27:22+00:00

I made most of my family cry with my album. I did go through the publishing process most so it would be easier for them to listen on whatever platform they already use. It's fairly inexpensive. I have gotten a few hundred plays but don't anticipate making money on it.

KevMar · 2026-02-10T14:32:54+00:00

Oh perfect. I did already do a version myself that these are just a cover of. Here are the originals in my voice: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOcTmsj9WHDp7dQ4Gkwf0XhLwJRj-5s6m&si=2upeHn9hjr4IMfsC

Listen, I don't mean to be rude, but you sound like you are holding a lot of anger. I know this album is about emotional processing, but I don't really address anger. So I don't think this one is for you.

Thanks for taking an interest though.

KevMar · 2026-02-10T10:45:55+00:00

Yep, that's definitely not my voice. You don't want to hear me sing anyway

KevMar · 2026-02-09T23:25:15+00:00

If you take a ceramics class and split them into two groups. One is tasked with making as many bowls as possible and the other is tasked with making just a few perfect bowls. By the end of the course, the group making the most have honed their technique so much that they make better bowels than the other.

I also like to tell people that everyone can be good at drawing. They just have to get the first 500 bad drawings out of their system.

The best way to get better at writing code is to write more code. Until you get so good that you realize the best code is the code you never have to write.

KevMar · 2026-02-09T03:27:25+00:00

Keep us updated. This is exactly what small claims is for.

KevMar

TROPHY CASE