Joe Houghes
Solutions Architect/FullStackGeek/Champion of Community
Castle Rock, Colorado, United States
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Joe Houghes is a leader of the Denver VMware, PowerShell, and Veeam User Groups. He is a Field Solutions Architect with Pure Storage and focuses on automating us out of typical IT operations while freeing us to perform higher-level tasks.
Joe has been the #1 speaker internationally for VMUG from 2021-2024 for virtual and in-person events. He is continually working to help & encourage the next community speaker(s) to take his place while helping to get them started.
Joe also works to evangelize the message that automation should be a focus for admins & engineers, even though it requires more in-depth thinking and focus beyond performing a task once. He knows that even though it is not always someone's default method, the result is repeatable and consistent.
Joe tries to help others understand why we should do the easy tasks better, and he challenges everyone to push themselves outside of their comfort zone and learn more about any topic of interest.
Joe is a collector of communities as a leader for three User Groups, and he's a member of various tech programs: Microsoft MVP, vExpert (Pro), Cisco Champion, Veeam Vanguard, Tanzu Vanguard, plus part of the vBrownBag crew. He tells people not to let fear keep them from sharing their knowledge with others and teaching from their unique perspective.
He's also easy to spot by the bright hat, big grin, and the loud "Howdy Y'all."
Awards
Area of Expertise
Topics
Mastering Your Career & Life: Taking Control of Both Your Paths
Many of us put time and effort working towards the next step in our current job, but we do not truly plan for achieving success in our careers. Often, we also focus too much on gaining and using our technical knowledge, without also working on other skills that are also relevant to both our professional and personal lives.
I've had a truly varied list of roles throughout my life & career, where I have had to wear many hats, and gained hard-learned lessons from some unique experiences along the way. In my career, I've talked to many people with the same questions, concerns, difficulties, and fears without realizing how common these are.
It doesn't matter where your experience came from, there are fundamental lessons that we can all understand from life and our experiences that we should be sharing with everyone. We don't always know how to apply these lessons to our current roles, nor use them to our advantage for our careers; every experience contains a lesson you can take from it to improve your life, career, and help others to do the same.
In this presentation, you can hear about some tech & life lessons that I have acquired, for you to learn from them and apply the knowledge without suffering some of the harrowing experiences yourself. If nothing else, you’ll get a few life tips, lots of book recommendations, and have a chance to laugh at some crazy tech stories.
Getting Super Geeky with PowerShell Notebooks - It's Easy!
How easy is it for you to do things like share code with your teammates, get them to use your tools/scripts, or onboard new employees, especially if they may not be as experienced with PowerShell as you?
Good news everyone, there's an easier way to do this!
PowerShell can leverage Notebooks - self-contained files which can contain not only code, but previous executions of the code. These notebooks can be hugely beneficial in easing the load of making sure that code works in different locations, including pipelines, and without worrying about things like a profile or extra pre-requisites outside of the code.
Although these notebooks were primarily built for data science usage, as proficient PowerShell enthusiasts, we are used to being flexible with making tools work for how we need them to work.
Even better, these notebooks also only need a platform with the capabilities of using their features, which for us is just VSCode and a simple extension.
Let's show everyone how easy it is to edit & execute code, deal with self-contained variables, run these in a pipeline, and use this as a documentation & training tool.
Building an LLM on your Laptop to Learn Faster
With the rise of LLMs (Large Language Models) and all of the amazing capabilities it can bring, tons of applications are being built which are based on huge LLM providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, AzureAI and Cohere.
One common assumption around many of these applications from common users, is that they are outside of the realm of what many of us could build ourselves. Fortunately, this is not the reality of our capabilities.
In this workshop to show how with we can build our own chatbot to speed up our learning through a little bit effort, the fantastic tech that is retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and a few components.
Not only will we walk through what these components do and how the interact, but we'll show everyone how we use them to construct an application similar to ChatPDF, but even simpler that we can run locally (or in a VM or container).
We'll then load up some documentation from PowerShell, PowerCLI, azcli, and maybe even PowerShell in a Month of Lunches to see how we can leverage this knowledge live, without taking the time to RTFM.
Seriously though, there is some huge power which comes from taking the time to understand how this type of tools works, and maybe giving yourself some shortcuts in using these tools, plus yourself and your peers having a new advantage in your day job - or just your personal learning.
Come join this workshop, let's learn a few things and build some cool tooling that you can use immediately. Hopefully this will launch you into some other projects as well.
Better Code and Collaboration through Open Source Concepts, Dev Containers, and Codespaces
This session will cover some best practices for open source regarding collabration and source control, along with how we can more easily manage environments for coding and automated testing.
We should encourage IT Pros to make it easier for collaboration and sharing within Git projects and these better practices and dev containers make this much simpler to become a reality.
We'll cover the how and why for some specific practices that we should be leveraging in our regular git usage, including:
- gitignore files to exclude files from source control
- using a reasonable branch strategy to avoid most conflicts in collaboration for IT repositories
- regularly making commits with meaningful commit messages
- effectively using pull requests when working with others
- GitHub projects to improve documentation and collaboration
- DevContainers and Codespaces to make it easy to package, distribute, and test code, along with lowering the barrier to entry for new users and collaborators for your code
- using Jupyter notebooks to further improve your documentation and usability of your code, as well as a training tool
Many IT Pros are working in code very often, but many of us got ourselves up to speed to be effective and did not continue on our paths to be more efficient and collaborate with others.
Furthermore, making our code easy to understand and consume for others who try and use it is not always a major focus for us, since we're more often trying to make things functional.
Come join this session to learn more about some easy tweaks to your process, along with additional tooling that can greatly improve your impact within your organization.
Tech & Life Lessons Learned from Wearing Many Hats in a Career
This session is an expansion of the fun "Tech Lessons Learned on a Farm" session hosted by the Cincinnati & Denver chapters in December 2022 & 2023.
I've had a truly varied list of roles throughout my career, where I have had to wear many hats, and gained hard-learned lessons from each role based on some unique experiences along the way.
In my technical career, my roles have ranged from SMB to Fortune 500, moving up from cable installer to helpdesk to SysAdmin to Architect. I also gained interesting experience working in manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, non-profit, federal organizations, and a cloud service provider, before moving to the vendor side.
During that time, while leading multiple user groups, I've talked to many users with the same questions, concerns, difficulties, and fears as others. During this time, I embraced wearing the brightly colored hats that I've become known for.
There are fundamental lessons that we can all understand from life and our experiences that we should be sharing with everyone. Even then, we don't always know how to apply these to our current technical roles and do not excel at using them to our advantage for our careers.
It doesn't matter where your experience came from, there is something you can share: whether working on a ranch in South Texas, jumping out of planes in the Air Force, breaking through walls Kool-Aid man style to escape a halon system, being pitched on becoming a "choo-choo" engineer, or walking into a dark data center because someone cut the power with a reciprocating saw.
Every experience you have had contains a lesson you can take from it to improve your career and others. In this session, you can hear about my tech & life lessons so you can learn from them and apply the benefits without suffering some of the harrowing experiences yourself.
From PowerCLI to API – Taking Your Automation Skills to the Next Level
This session will focus on how to leverage basic skills with PowerCLI to understand the vCenter API, which many VMware administrators have not interacted with directly, and we'll also learn how to interact with an API.
We will cover some core concepts about PowerShell and PowerCLI, then look at some side-by-side comparisons between native PowerCLI cmdlets, the .NET objects returned by Get-View cmdlet, and finally the vSphere API for automation. We'll also use the vCenter API for reporting and basic automation tasks, while comparing the performance to PowerCLI cmdlets. We'll wrap up with creating a VM from the API Explorer and Postman tso that everyone can see how simple it is to take the first step.
While this may be slightly more difficult to understand, the performance benefits at scale are dramatic, and learning how to interact with the vCenter API can translate to other platforms outside of PowerCLI for automation.
Being Effective at Technical Communication - Technology Not Required
How effective are you at communicating your ideas and plans? Are you as effective when delivering these concepts to your business leaders as to your technical staff?
Being an effective communicator involves being focused on how to deliver the message you are trying to convey. You must ensure that it is delivered in a way that others can understand. You need to deliver your message with 'your' focus removed.
In practice, being effective at communicating means that you must know how to best deliver your message in a manner that your audience can understand.
We will have some specific coverage for what this means as it relates to virtual presentations & meetings, as this can differ from in-person communications.
This talk will discuss the typical obstacles you will encounter, such as non-verbal communication, personalities, emotions, background, audience focus, developing trust, and overcoming virtual communications.
Technical skills are rarely the issue that you will encounter in delivering your message, and we'll discuss how to make sure you are successful.
DevOps 101 for the Systems Admin - Code, Git, CI/CD & Infrastructure as Code
This session will focus on helping everyone to understand the basics of some new core skills that everyone may or may not have.
We will start with some basics & best practices of PowerShell & PowerCLI, run through a demo of using Git for source control, see a simple CI/CD pipeline for updating templates for your VMware environment, and then quick demos using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools - Terraform & Ansible.
These concepts & tools may either be entirely new to you, or they may be components that you haven't wired together yet, so this session is about putting these pieces together to understand how to do it effectively.
How to Excel As a Great Mentor and Mentee
Do you know what is required to be a great mentor? Were you also aware that there is a way to be a better mentee?
This session will help you to better define your goals, identify potential weaknesses, and determine the best areas in which a mentor can help you improve.
You can get huge personal and professional gains if you leverage the help of any advisor who is willing to boost your skills.
Building upon this, one of the best ways to better yourself can be to mentor someone.
You don't need to be an expert in any field, and it doesn't have to be technical in nature, but you will need some skills to do this effectively.
Lessons Learned about Automation - SysAdmin to Architect to User Group Leader to Author
This is a session based upon lessons that have been learned through a career progressing from SysAdmin to Architect, then partner, consultant, and now vendor Solutions Architect.
It counters these lessons with the things I have seen and discussed as a leader of multiple user groups, including 2 PowerShell User Groups More flavor is added by my experience with editing and manuscript reviews for major publishers and the PowerShell Conference Book. Finally, with writing a book on automation focused on the logic and reasoning for what we are trying to accomplish, I see this is not a typical roadmap when starting with basic automation.
There are many considerations to automation that go far beyond basic scripting, and I think this is a bit different from the normal perspective of starting to script and getting more advanced over time. I hope that looking at the broader picture and considerations will lead to more in-depth conversations about automation, both in the session and after.
How To Leverage Being a Geek in the Tech vCommunity to Elevate Your Career
In this session, we'll discuss lots of topics focused on our personal & professional passions and sharing those with others. No matter the technology we work with daily, or if we share an outside interest in things like video games, sci-fi/fantasy movies & books, or non-IT technology like home automation and Plex, we are all part of user groups for our desire to be part of a strong community with a shared purpose.
Many of us have found assistance, gained skills, enjoyed some camaraderie, or made friends within this community. Unfortunately, not enough of our community members are leveraging the vCommunity to power up their careers.
By putting in some effort to share with the community, make deeper connections with others, and have some open conversations, we all have a wealth of resources available to us. Whether your focus is around your own goals & career aspirations, a desire to branch out into different skills & roles, or even increase your chances of earning a promotion or higher pay & greater benefits, these are all desires that we can help each other to achieve.
In my opinion, we are all Geeks in this tech community based on our love of different interests and our passion for sharing mutual topics.
However, I want to make sure that everyone learns how else we can leverage this community to benefit everyone, enhance our relationships, achieve our own goals, and give back to strengthen the community by helping others.
Using GitHub Actions to Automate Terraform for Azure
In this session, we'll run through some basics of Azure, Terraform and Github actions. Then I'll demo the following:
Create an Azure service principal via Azure CLI for automation
Create an Azure resource group with Terraform via CLI
Create a YAML file for GitHub Actions workflow (for leveraging the Terraform-GitHub-Actions extension)
Use GitHub Actions to execute our Terraform config and build Azure resources including:
-Virtual network, subnet, public IP
-Traffic manager
-Virtual machines
-Kubernetes cluster
Leveraging Pipelines for Custom VM Templates
Leveraging a StackStorm pipeline to create a VM template following a workflow.
This session will cover a workflow which enacts the following steps:
ServiceNow incident opened for new VM template
GitHub Repo cloned
Packer to deploy template from spec
Configure VM template with Puppet
Validate the template build
Feed metadata into ServiceNow CMDB & create CMDB entry
Close incident
SQL Saturday Baton Rouge 2023 Sessionize Event
psconf.eu 2023 Sessionize Event
PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2023 Sessionize Event
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