Effortless module delivery with Sampler

The success of your automation success story is conditioned by your ability to create, collaborate, maintain and distribute your PowerShell code without friction.

In this session, we'll quickly review the PowerShell module fundamentals, and discover some of the pain points encountered when maintaining them.
We'll use Sampler, a PowerShell Plaster module that helps you create a module scaffolding, add elements to it, and set up automated pipelines.
We'll then discover how to set up pipelines to automatically build, version, and test your code, before automatically publish releases to a Gallery.

At the end of this session, you will have a working pipeline that will automatically publish a PowerShell module to a gallery upon code change.

Intro Sampler- Taking your Module development and deployment a step further

Sampler is a module which will help you to develop, build, test, collaborate and deploy your PowerShell modules with ease.

When you are developing your PowerShell modules, you will need to be able to

- develop locally in a clean environment
- build your module for deployment with just the files required for the module to work for your users
- test locally and in CI/CD pipelines
- collaborate with other developers
- deploy your modules to the (or a) PowerShell Gallery with GitHub Actions or Azure Devops Pipelines

Sampler can enable you to do all of this and in this session, I will show you how and give you some examples of projects using Sampler and give you all that you need to be able to start using it tomorrow.

IaC: Configuration YAML et manipulation en PowerShell

Avec les pratiques d'infrastructure as code (IaC), il devient incontournable de maîtriser le langage YAML.
Et l'automatisation nous pousse à créer de nouveaux systèmes, de nouvelles abstractions, et de nouveaux langages ou DSL qui a leur tour devront être configuré par des fichiers YAML.
Dans cette session nous découvrirons rapidement le modèle de config as code, comment écrire le YAML, ses particularités avant d'aborder avec des démos et exemples comment créer le PowerShell qui peut le parser.

Configuration Management: Do's & Don'ts

You found in PowerShell a great way to automate your Infrastructure.
You get it, and although you might feel alone in your organisation, you're creating scripts, modules to configure and manage your systems.

You're on a mission to automate all the things!
Great! Now what? Where does it evolve from there?

In this session, we'll make sure we understand how our decisions to automate impacts our customers, and why we should differentiate strategy and tactics.
We'll review the key reasons for automation and how they drive the evolution of configuration management, which in turns explains the evolution of some technologies.

While we go through this journey, we'll discover many concepts hiding behind the DevOps or Infrastructure as Code notions, and call out direct actions to do or avoid when on your Configuration Journey.

While this talk won't be directly about tools and implementations, it may use illustrations taken from familiar solutions such as Puppet, Chef, Ansible and DSC.

Non-coding skills for successful Automation in your organisation

Writing the automation is the easy part, growing adoption is hard!
Let's think through the "Why Automating" and discover models, tools and practices that can help focusing on the right thing, targeting the right problem, for the right person, working in an optimized way for your context!

As technologist it may be easy for us to understand the benefit of a technical solution. It is often harder to know how the solution we're developing will be received, and how to optimize the impact, manage its delivery process, and communicate around it.

In this session, we will discover what **models** can help you understanding what matters to your organisation, and how you can identify what to focus on for maximizing **the value** you create.
We will start by identifying how your organisation creates value, and see where your team comes to play in the **Value Chain**. With this information we'll highlight your **direct customers** and how to think about the **product(s) or service(s)** you are building.
We will then see how building **personas** for your users can help the communication to be more precise, and help **managing priorities and focus**.
With this context in mind, we can now decompose the **user journey** and isolate the features to deliver in priority.
As soon as you start developing, you want to get **feedback as early as possible** to avoid going in the wrong direction: let's create the **feedback loop** between your customers and your team.
If your work is about streamlining systems with automation, we can use the **Value Stream map** to identify **the constraint** or where the best improvements to the **cycle time** can be achieved, or where you can make conscious **tactical choice** without undermining your **strategy**.

Now that you know what to work on, we can discuss how to manage that work. Let's start by defining [**4 types of work**](https://www.e4developer.com/2018/03/24/the-phoenix-project-a-key-to-understanding-devops/), and how to [**Making Work Visible**](https://itrevolution.com/making-work-visible-by-dominica-degrandis/) to better communicate and identify problems.
Let's see one way of organising our work in fixed-length **iterations**, to **balance focus and agility**.
We're making sure we deliver what we plan, use a **WIP limit** to leave room for **unplanned work**, while accounting for it to identify issues such as a lack of quality.

Any changes you're bringing will meet resistance, so let's learn from the model of **diffusion of innovation** to optimize our approach. Let's also be wary of the [**Automation Fear Spiral**](https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/infrastructure-code-automation-fear-spiral) to avoid the risks of returning to old ways over time.
Finally, don't rush: **slow is smooth, smooth is fast**. We need to get the [**delivery system**](https://itrevolution.com/the-three-ways-principles-underpinning-devops/) in place first, before we ramp up its speed and capacity.

This is not a "technical" session. It focuses on the tools and practices that help automation experts and managers to better align the work to the business needs, and organising their teams.