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Matthew Hodgkins Blog

❤️er of Platform Engineering, SRE, K8s, Golang, Observability and working with nice humans. Aussie living in the Netherlands.

  1. 5 Tips for Writing DSC Resources in PowerShell 5

    I have recently been writing some class based DSC resources and have been enjoying the experience much more than (trying to) write DSC resources in PowerShell v4. Using classes really simplifies the development process of the DSC resources, and I believe class based resources will be the norm going forward. As PowerShell v5 RTM has only been recently released back in February 2016, the large majority of DSC resources available on GitHub still use the...…

  2. Windows Metric Dashboards with InfluxDB and Grafana

    Understanding performance of your infrastructure is extremely important, especially when running production systems. There is nothing worse than a customer calling and saying they are experiencing slowness with one of their applications and you having no idea where to start looking. In the 2014 State of DevOps survey survey, one of the questions asked was how is your organization notified of failure?. Here was the multiple choice question asked: Through the survey, one of the...…

  3. ChatOps on Windows with Hubot and PowerShell

    UPDATED 20th May, 2017: If you are more comfortable with Python, you can this post on Errbot and PowerShell. UPDATED 8th July, 2016: Created a installation video for Hubot using PowerShell DSC here. UPDATED 1st July, 2016: Created a PowerShell DSC Resource to install Hubot which makes the process much easier. Can be found on GitHub here or found in the PowerShell Gallery here. ChatOps is a term used to describe bringing development or operations...…

  4. Setup Windows 10 For Chef and PowerShell DSC Development

    I am in the process of writing up some blog posts about working with PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) and OpsCode Chef from a Windows Workstation / Windows Server perspective. This first article will cover the steps required to setup a development environment for someone that is doing work with PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) or OpsCode Chef. We will be covering the following: Installing git and poshgit - source control for your code and PowerShell integration for git Installing VirtualBox...…

  5. The Ultimate Guide to PowerShell String Formatting

    When scripting with PowerShell, you will come to a point where you need to work with strings that contain variables. Depending on your situation, there are several methods you can use when formatting strings in PowerShell. This blog will walk through these options. We will start simple and ramp up the complexity. We run into our first problem here. We are using a dollar sign in our string, so PowerShell thinks it is a variable...…