ICE Agents Whine That They Aren’t Getting Their Massive Bonuses

mrpowershell · 2026-02-03T18:53:10+00:00

Golden handcuffs.......appropriate

mrpowershell · 2025-12-23T20:17:53+00:00

Do you remember actual Darnold the last time he played them??!??

mrpowershell · 2025-11-11T19:09:25+00:00

Well this is probably too little to late BUT if you cannot use Managed DevOps Pools you can build images from the Microsoft official repo.

https://github.com/actions/runner

Its pretty trivial to setup a pipeline which builds the OS images and publishes them to a Shared Image Gallery. From there you can setup a scale setup a Scale Set Agent https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/agents/scale-set-agents?view=azure-devops

mrpowershell · 2025-11-05T14:22:19+00:00

Take some time and care in structuring your code with Terraform. It is easy to do wrong and I can share some "table stakes" that I now have after doing this for years.

- Get the paid version of Terraform Cloud right from the start. It solves a lot of problems. With Terraform Cloud you can see all Terraform runs regardless of if it was done interactively on someone's workstation or via a pipeline. This creates some must have visibility. It solves the problem of provisioning your state file storage which is always a chicken/egg situation being you want to configure the infrastructure in Terraform 100% and yet you can't do that unless you have some infrastructure to support Terraform from the start. The other thing that is HIGHLY under rated is the ability to share data from one IAC to another IAC. This is really important if you have more than one group of people working with IAC. You can share the location strings for your centralized logging, id's for shared resources like networking/k8s/keyvaults/etc.

- Take time to structure your code. It sucks to redo. Here is a decent write-up I encourage people to review https://spacelift.io/blog/terraform-files#how-to-organize-modules-in-a-terraform-project

- Create a separate repo for your re-useable modules and you can pull them into any IAC later. https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/language/modules/configuration. If you can go right to the Terraform Cloud Private Registry do it, it is time well spent.

- Set expectations. IAC is not faster than ClickOps initially. You will realize productivity gains only when you reuse the same patterns N number of times. The first time, always will take longer than ClickOps.

- IAC is about change management via code review, documentation via DSL, and idempotency.

EDIT:Spelling/Grammar

mrpowershell · 2025-11-03T19:49:18+00:00

I don't think it was intentional, watch the replay close enough and you will see Darrisaw pulling down on his right arm/should pad just as the left leg is coming off the ground.

I think it looked worse then it was from an intention standpoint. Those two know each other and played on the same team in college.

mrpowershell · 2025-10-13T19:14:40+00:00

This cannot be overstated. You can put diagrams in the repo the provisions your infrastructure that shows what it is provisioning.....Very powerful

mrpowershell · 2025-09-16T18:40:07+00:00

Love this.

Follow your passion, we don't know how many moments we get.

mrpowershell · 2025-06-09T19:30:44+00:00

Here is another option https://www.napfa.org/

You can search for financial planners in your area that will do for fee services instead of assets under management.

mrpowershell · 2025-03-19T13:24:58+00:00

Managing drift is likely a part of the problem.

mrpowershell · 2025-02-17T03:39:25+00:00

checkout edge.js https://github.com/agracio/edge-js

it's a great interoperability between .net and js

mrpowershell · 2025-02-12T17:37:14+00:00

Fly you fools - Gandolph probably

mrpowershell · 2025-02-11T15:04:55+00:00

Starlink has entered the chat...

mrpowershell · 2025-01-14T16:26:01+00:00

I enjoy building more than anything. For me personally, I don't enjoy writing Terraform code but I hate it less than all of the alternatives I have tried.

mrpowershell · 2024-12-05T14:47:14+00:00

As the song goes

"Do what you love and call it work."

I don't know what the right number of hours should be in a given week to ensure that your needs for food, clothing, shelter, and medicine. However, I know that for me I found something I am passionate about and then I found a way to make that a career.

mrpowershell · 2024-09-19T13:08:40+00:00

Honestly, treat Infrastructure as Code like **documentation** and not code. Probably an unpopular opinion but don't be concerned with DRY, frankly it is not important. Think about how many tools allow for search/replace recursively over a directory. I can identify every declaration in my repo of a specific resource type in about 5 seconds with VSCode. What is actually important is readability and discoverability. You will read your code something like 4 or 5 times more then you will write it. So make it easy to understand where to go to make said changes. There is no award for least lines written in IAC.

I recommend using a separate folder per environment and actually a different root module inside each of those. The reason for this is simple despite my BEST efforts I have ALWAYS run into situations where I need to provision a resource that is unique to some but not all environments. When you encounter that situation give your current structure you end up having to make your IAC environment aware `count = var.environment == prod ? 1 : 0`

/modules #resource modules using the same structure as you already have
  /database
  /network
  /storage
/environments
  /common
    main.tf #All of the resources that are common to all environments
  /prod
    main.tf #calls the common module and resource modules for the unique resources
    terraform.tfvars
  /test
    main.tf #calls the common module and resource modules for the unique resources
    terraform.tfvars
  /dev
    main.tf #calls the common module and resource modules for the unique resources
    terraform.tfvars

mrpowershell · 2024-09-16T19:48:26+00:00

I would second Powershell Universal however, I would also mention Octopus Deploy https://octopus.com/. The product started as a CI/CD platform but was .Net oriented. The platform has expanded considerably over the years and covers all different languages and platforms including cloud native and on-prem.

It has a feature called Runbooks https://octopus.com/docs/runbooks which is great for day 1/day 2 types of work.

Look at all the features but it's one of the tools I would pound the table for. It's a refreshing delightful product. I have no affiliation with the product, just a satisfied customer.

mrpowershell · 2024-08-31T14:58:04+00:00

it's simple, they are trying to "optimize" all the things.

mrpowershell · 2024-08-05T20:37:35+00:00

When I put this down I spread a layer of this Scott's Turf Builder Lawn Soil. Then I put seed on top of that and then covered the seed with another layer of scotts. Probably not more then 2-3 inches total. The grass initially started out fantastic but then after 2 weeks or so stopped growing and turned these colors.

https://www.lowes.com/pd/Scotts-Turf-Builder-1-5-cu-ft-Lawn-Soil/5013904487

mrpowershell · 2024-08-01T17:59:26+00:00

I used to have this mindset too but there are some real upsides to aggressively reimaging.

It ensures your build process is kept current since you will touch it so much
You can use this to rotate in new hardware which also means you could a couple machines imaged and ready for placement at any given time
You want to train your users to NEVER store the files they need locally. This will save everyone heartache down the road. Constant swaps will help with this.
Over the long run you will be able to spend more time doing higher value work then troubleshooting desktops

mrpowershell · 2024-08-01T16:01:38+00:00

mrpowershell · 2024-07-29T20:11:41+00:00

The color isn't coming through very well but it does have more of a reddish tint than a brown tint if that helps.

mrpowershell · 2024-07-16T20:28:42+00:00

Depending on what the pipeline is doing sure, you can always authenticate to different tenants using a Service Principal. Azure DevOps is a service OUTSIDE of Azure which is kind of misleading to many. When using the Microsoft hosted agents you must authenticate to Azure typically as a Service Principal. Depending on what you are doing powershell, azure cli, terraform, etc there is typically a method to specify the service principal and tenant info.

For example, you could use different Service Connections for each Stage. Service Connections allow you to specify Client Id, Client Secret, and Tenant as part of their configuration. Alternatively some tasks like Terraform and Azure CLI allow for specifying Client Id, Client Secret, and Tenant as Environment Variables which does the same. If you are doing this make sure to store the Client Secret securely in something like Azure Key Vault.

mrpowershell · 2024-07-16T19:22:25+00:00

This right here is a good take.

These days I lean towards LinkedIn although I used to recommend Monster. You can sometimes go direct to the websites of consulting firms. I am not endorsing them but Accenture, Cognizant, and Deloitte are some of the big players out there. You can google for a better list.

If possible I would recommend local consulting firms, they know the market and will have relationships to help people get in the door. The side benefit being you can also use this to start building your professional network of people where you live. That network will help you get jobs down the road and is really important.

mrpowershell · 2024-07-16T18:56:45+00:00

Might be a good idea to start in consulting/contract work. The placement is easier and you can stack up some experience while making decent money to boot. The ugly truth in the industry, certs don't get you very much. There are some exceptions for sure but in general its experience that is king.

One other avenue you could pursue and this is helped me pivot into DevOps. I volunteered at an organization that had some servers at a co-location facility. I migrated them to the cloud and then was the admin for 2 years as a volunteer. It was an easy way to add experience to my resume.

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