Welcome to Summit! How are you all doing today? Good. Everybody got here? That's

really, for us, as the folks who put this on, when you show up, we're like, okay, it's real. They're really here. It's fine. We're good. This, as you might be able to tell by looking around you, is the biggest summit ever. We have a whole mess of people here. We sold out two months ago. Thank you. That is a big help. Keep that in mind for next year, by the way. You

know, the boss is like, you know, I mean, no, actually now, because it's gonna sell out, and there it went. We have about a $500,000 budget to put this thing on, plus all the money you guys are bringing in for your hotel rooms, and going out and drinking. There's a little bit of that. Going out and eating and all that. Four tracks of content for three days. So four huge rooms upstairs, full of

technical goodness. We've got some hour and 45 minute sessions, some 45 minute sessions. Be sure that you're checking the app. How many of you got the app? Oh, wow. That worked. Was it the 19 emails telling you to get the app? Yep.

Be sure you check that or the SCED website. One of the two. They both have the same content, because we are going to have some last-minute schedule changes. We did have, unfortunately, have a couple speakers who, for medical reasons, weren't able to come. So we've had to just rearrange and move some things around. Just keep an eye on that. Our first ever scholarship recipient is

here. Where's Andrew? All the way in the back. Good choice. That's a program that we're going to look to expand on a little bit in a slightly different way. We'll talk more about that later, because we really do feel that part of advancing our craft and our trade is helping bring new people into it, and

so we're going to try and work hard on that. We have got a big week lined up for you, and we hope you enjoy it. Just a quick recap. 2013, we had about 100 people in two tracks. We were actually in two conference rooms on Microsoft's campus. 2014, about 175 people. It was our first time here, and we also did a

show in Amsterdam. 2015, about the same number of people, two tracks. We moved to Charlotte, tried that for a year. In fact, a lot of the photos and the slide deck are from that Charlotte event, because I happen to have access to those easily, and we did an event in Stockholm. 2016, the great folks over in Europe, including Tobias Weltner, put on their own PSConf.eu, and so now we've

got a fantastic showing over there. They do a great job with that, and we did 220 people back here in Bellevue. Last year, 2017, our fifth anniversary, we had 270 some people across three tracks, and this year we have over 350 summer tiers, four tracks back here at the Maidenbauer. Incredibly, incredibly

proud, because this happened with like no marketing. You remember the brochure that we didn't send out? That. The advertising that we didn't take out, the banner ads that we didn't do. This is just you guys. It's just word of mouth. It's you telling your colleagues. It's you retweeting. It's you doing the whatever the thing is on Facebook that you do before they steal your info. It's just that happening, so you're doing this. Some big thanks. Just

to really quickly let you know who really runs this thing. Richard Sittaway is in charge of our content. He's sitting up front here. That is a thankless job, so be sure to thank him. Jason Helmick is our chief financial

officer over here. Jeff Hicks also helped with the content, does a lot of our community outreach, so really, really happy to have him on board. Jeff and I have been friends for a long time. Will Anderson is the one running around with the camera. He also helps run Powershell.org. Everybody know about Powershell.org, right? The website? Yep. He makes that happen. And

then Christopher Gannon, who does our event logistics. He's the one who orders the meals and arranges for the hotel and the venue space and all that stuff. Another huge job, so when you see him, just give him a little thumbs up. And then our past directors, Steve Mirowski, Dave Wyatt, and Kirk Monroe. Kirk is with us here this week as well as a presenter.

Huge thanks, especially to all of our friends from the product team that makes Powershell. Their support of this event, their selflessness with showing up and mingling and meeting and greeting and presenting and everything else has just made this an event like no other. And we really,

really appreciate that. I've been working in the Microsoft space for a little over 20 years, and a lot of that has been working directly with product teams. I've worked with a lot of different teams at Microsoft on different products and projects, and I have never seen a group that was so

distinctly aware of their audience and cared so much about what their audience's pain points are and where their successes lie and how they can help them get there. So a big round please for the entire team. And a whole huge mess of them are going to be here tonight. We've got some

lightning demos this afternoon, and our reception this evening is right back where you will, where you had breakfast and where you will have lunch. And so we're going to have a great time with them. And then also thanks to our unprecedentedly large slate of sponsors this year, Microsoft, VMware Code, System Frontier, Tanium, Chocolaty, and Rubrik. Tanium will have a

lunch session today. Definitely invite you to enjoy that. They've got some water bottles to hand out in exchange for business cards. They're doing a little raffle for a premium prize, a set of branded Allbird shoes. We've really, really appreciate their input because things like feeding you

become easier when we have a little bit more money to work with. And the fact that they took the time to reach out to us because they want to meet our audience and find out what you're dealing with and see how they might be able to help or offer some insight, that's a huge, huge deal. This isn't like a major vendor expo thing. They actually want to talk to you. So

take the time and do that. Find out what it is they do. Find out how you can maybe get involved with what they're doing. Ask how they can get involved with what you're doing. They want to be here, and they tried really hard to do it because we suck at soliciting sponsors really, really badly. Like, we barely even had a sign-up form for them, and it all happened at the last minute, and they were all very patient. So we definitely appreciate that.

I'd like to recognize Kenneth Hansen. Kenneth, are you, happened to be here? I wasn't sure if he was gonna be able to make it today or not. All right. Kenneth, since before PowerShell was PowerShell, was helping to run that team. He helped run the program managers that really contributed a lot of the

detailed vision and the execution that made it happen. Kenneth recently left Microsoft. He has a new adventure that he's pursuing, but we wanted to just take a moment and thank him because if it hadn't been for the work that he did, along with so many others, PowerShell would not be a success today because it was him and Aaron, who he worked for at the time, who

sat myself and Jason Helmut down in a cafeteria on Microsoft's campus and said, we need you to run a conference that's a real expert level deep dive, and we can't give you a dime, and we'll give you very little support because we're going to get bored and distracted and we'll forget, but we need you to run it anyway. And we're like, okay, that sounds like all

upsides. Sure. And then we're really there when we needed something from the team to help us out. So I'm going to get this to Kenneth, but I'm going to show you what he's getting. This is our first commemorative challenge coin. Yeah. Oh, these are sexy. There's a very

small number of these in existence, and they're going to go to people who make a dedicated, sustained, long-term, impactful contribution to our community. You're not going to see very many of these in your life. So if you get a chance, the

next person you can ask to show you one is Angel. You do. You're good, sir. Thanks so much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Angel was kind of in a parallel position with

Kenneth, roughly in the org chart, and did a lot to help the developers keep that side of the PowerShell team moving. Angel has also recently stepped away from Microsoft to pursue a new adventure. He will be deeply, deeply missed, but he will still be very much a part of our community, because our community is about a lot more than any one company, right? Right.

Does everybody say yes? Okay. Jason, could you help me with this next bit? Cool. Jason, as you know, is our chief financial officer. Jason was really instrumental in getting us through the accounting side of becoming a nonprofit,

and it turns out he can't do math. He sucks at it. So we're firing Jason this year, but before we did, I wanted you to have our third. As I said earlier,

when we created our nonprofit, the DevOps Collective, that runs this whole

dumpster fire, we really, really wanted to make it a real nonprofit. Like it wasn't just a tax dodge, and we decided that the thing we wanted to do was focus on education. Not just educating you guys, but educating the guys and gals who have to come after us, the next generation. Now, as you know before, we've talked about education programs and study guides and things

that we've tried to put together, and we eventually came to realize that as a very tiny group of volunteers, we just did not have the capability to reach out to that younger audience that we wanted to help bring into our community. And I started looking around, and how many of you could probably off the top of your head name a nonprofit that wants to teach kids to code, right?

Teach kids to code is a big thing. It's a great thing. Kids get that, right? They see the apps on their phone, and they want to write the app on their phone. I understand that, but that code's got to run somewhere, and that's our job. And I had a really tough time finding someone that we could partner with to get some kids to be able to build networks and run

servers and all that. And so I reached out to some friends of mine in Las Vegas who work in the nonprofit world, and they pointed us out to someone. So I'm going to show you a little video here real quick. There's this gap where there's people that know how to run college, and

then there's people that are just there because they were told to go there, which is how it felt for me. I knew go to class, which is what I did. I went to class. I did my work. I didn't know about the networking. I didn't know about finding programs. I didn't know how to find internships. I didn't know how I was supposed to present myself and how to do all those things. And coming to MIT works, that's the bridge. These folks that Tech Impact tees up for us that

have so far been outstanding, every single one of them. They have a diversity of thought. They have a diversity of background, and it is a hugely positive experience for everybody, them and our colleagues. This program is delivering highly skilled, highly motivated, highly engaged individuals.

These are people, when they come out of this program, are young professionals, and they're ready to go to work. Tech Impact, I think, does great work. The benefit for us, I think, is it gets us in the marketplace. It gets

us known, and we want to be known as an organization that's active in the community, you know, and doing more than just serving our clients. It's a very layered relationship, so also with the mentoring, volunteering, having associates part of the Friday professional development days, it's really a well-rounded partnership for us, and we don't often see that, so it's

the reason that we're so committed to the program and that we continue to grow with it every year. I think that's one of the most beautiful things about the program is because it's a learning opportunity not only for the student, but for the employees of the company. This program breaks you out of the

comfort zone of being stuck in your phone, of being glued to a television, of being stuck online sending emails or instant messaging. It takes us away from that stereotype of being the generation that's lost in the phone that can't call. So many of the managers talked about what they learned from the students and how they saw growth in their teams because they were given the

opportunity to mentor someone and share what they knew. They work with you, they help you out in any way possible, literally any way, and they will come and ask you over and over, what do you need, what can we do for you, how can we make this better for you? Because of them, I believe I will succeed, and I believe that they played a huge part in that. The main thing for me is you

don't have to have a technical background to succeed in the program. They really do give you the tools. I'm securing a future for my son and I. I'm doing something that, you know, that's incredible and I'm doing something worth

speaking about. It really makes you feel good, it boosts your confidence, it makes you feel worthy of yourself, it makes you want to just do better. What I've noticed with this program is it didn't just do this for me, but it did this for the class that I was in. Everybody was able to open up to a whole new world and it helped bridge some type of gap, something that you were missing that would help you in this field. Whether it was you didn't know the skills or

whether it was you didn't know how to show that you knew the skills, it gave everyone that chance to bridge out and actually find their way to success. So here to talk just a little bit about our partnership with Tech Impact and IT Works is Cammie Lewis.

Good morning. First of all, I just want to say a huge thank you to DevOps Collective and the support that you've provided because it's huge to us, so thank you very much. Just to give you a little bit of a background on Tech Impact, it was formed in 2002. It's based in Philadelphia. And their purpose really was to provide a resource for non-profits to be

able to have access to IT services and support that they could actually afford. And so as an offshoot of that, they began to realize that there was this increasing need for entry level IT people. And then there was also this increasingly disengaged group of young adults who weren't employed, they were underemployed, and they needed a place to go.

So they created the IT Works program to bridge that gap and give these students an opportunity to build a life for themselves. In some cases, get themselves out of poverty level and create a career. So the IT Works program is 16 weeks long. It is pretty intense. They're Monday through Friday, 9 to 3.

And they have 11 weeks in the classroom. They train towards the A-plus and the Cisco IT essential certifications. And then after their 11 weeks in the class, they take their A-plus exam and then hopefully pass it and go on to a five-week internship where they have an opportunity to actually get some hands-on experience.

And learn in the field. But as part of the program, I think what makes it really unique is that we don't just teach them the skills IT-wise. We also teach them soft skills. We provide them with a mentor. So every student gets matched with a mentor that is with them throughout the program. Spends about an hour a week touching base with them, providing support, encouragement,

and hopefully teaching them to network and get involved in the IT community. And then we also have Friday sessions where we take them off-site to partner organizations and they help us teach a soft skill to the students. So they learn things like emotional intelligence and professionalism in the workplace and resumes and cover letters and things like that.

So that when they come out of the program, not only do they have the IT skills, but they also have the soft skills that employers are saying that they're important. And so that helps them then work with our career development associate to find jobs, which is our goal. We've also just launched a coding program called Punch Code, which we're very excited about.

And listening to employers, we're also doing a Net Plus program to help continue our students engage and be able to build their careers. And all of it is, well, Punch Code isn't, but all of it is free to the students so they have an opportunity to learn. We pay their certification fees. We've taken away the barrier of money to them being able to get an education.

And it's through the generous support of people like DevOps that help us do that. So I think that's all I had. Thanks very much. Thank you. Thank you. So in 2017, we made a $50,000 contribution to Tech Impact to support

the IT Works program in particular, helped almost 30 kids go through their program. And that's a huge deal. Like, I want you to imagine that you're one of these kids that just doesn't know where to go. Maybe you love computers and you just don't know how to get into it.

And the barriers are not low. You guys know what it costs to get a certification exam or what it costs to go to a one-week class, let alone a 16-week program. And they're helping place these kids, and it's changing lives. We now have an annual commitment to continue that contribution, and we want to support this program over the long haul. They currently operate out of three different cities.

Kami will be at our reception tonight, so if you see or ask about the program, if you work for a company that might want to be involved in that type of internship and help and getting involved, talk to her about it. You know what? Let's help them start up 10 more of these things and help kids get jobs. But I want to point something out. That financial contribution didn't come from nowhere.

It came directly from you. You being here is where that money came from. So thank you. Give yourselves a round. All righty, let's talk a little bit about what's ahead. Who's excited for the week?

Who's been like, yeah, all right, got on the airplane and all that? So here's what's happening. Later today, after me, oh, wrong Snover, sorry. We'll hear from the other Snover, the one who works for Microsoft. We'll hear a little bit about what's happening with PowerShell these days. Our lunch is sponsored by Tanium, so as you're over there, give them a little bit of attention.

They're going to be, as I said, offering water bottles in exchange for business cards, and those will serve you well during the week, those bottles. And they're also going to be raffling off a pair of branded shoes. This afternoon, we have our famous team lightning demos. We also have a talk by Bruce Payette. You guys heard of him? Yeah, you know who he is?

Okay. And then tonight's the fun reception. We're going to have a great time with that. So be flexible with us on the schedule. Today is the day where our published showtimes are more of a guide. Because however long, like I'm not going to come shut Jeffrey Snover up. It's just not going to happen. So just be flexible with us on the showtimes and kind of pay attention to what's going on

and don't rely too much on the exact times being there. Oh, Kenneth's here. Kenneth, come up here. Come up here. Come, come, come, come, come. I thought you could just show up late and not get up here, huh? So we talked about you a little bit, and we decided we wanted to thank you and recognize you

for all the years that you've helped us as a community as well as PowerShell with our first series of commemorative challenge coins. Yep. Those don't exist for very many people. So thank you, sir. Thank you so much.

Tuesday, breakouts galore, tons of breakout sessions. Again, please check the app just so that you can catch any minor rearrangements we had to do. The community lightning demos will be tomorrow afternoon. And so make sure you see Warren if you want to sign up for that. Really proud of the fact that a bunch of our new speakers this year were first-time

presenters through the community lightning demos last year. And the big piece of feedback, because we did those the last day, and the big piece of feedback we got was do them earlier because I wanted to talk to that person about what they demoed. And so we've now moved it to Tuesday, and we've set aside a specific room upstairs, 403,

as a casual lounge where you can just go sit and talk and catch up and network and everything else. We've got side sessions running, kind of at odd times. It's just based on what people ask for. And you can suggest a side session to that email address. I will schedule them in SCED, so again, check that app because there will be stuff added to the schedule all week.

And then Tuesday night, tomorrow night, is kind of an on-your-own. Find some folks, find some fellows, some materials, go grab lunch or dinner, grab a drink, sit down, talk, network. If you're looking for some suggestions, there are several listed in that event in the SCED app of some nearby places. And another place I'll recommend that is new, that we just discovered this trip, is called

the Lincoln Square South Food Hall. So if you're looking and you see the Nordstrom Rack signage, it's on the second level of that building. And it's one vendor, but they've broken it down into all these different, there's like a little wine bar and a burger place and a pizza place and a taco place. But it's not like Taco Bell, it's good tacos, right?

And it's just a kind of a cool, funky little place with a lot of places to just sit and have small conversations. And it's really, really affordable, too, if you're on that expense account. Wednesday, all-day sessions, all-day breakouts and side sessions. Our lunch will be sponsored by VMware code. Lunches are down here. Don't lose track of that. Like lunches and breakfasts will always be down here.

And then we'll be upstairs. Bear in mind that around mealtimes, we'll probably have both sets of escalators running in one direction. So if you want to go the other direction, you need to find the stairs or the elevator, not the escalator. Our big evening party is at Tavern Hall, which is down as part of that whole Bell Square, Bellevue collection situation.

It's a short walk from here. We've got some games, there's shuffleboard, there's darts. We're going to have some fantastic food. You must wear your badge. Deep apologies for the screw-up with the badges, but so long as you've got your badge holder and badge, we'll be fine, but we need to see that. I know in past, it's been Matt's fine.

I know him. We've got a very specific insurance policy. So I need to know that all my people are my people. If you're one of the folks who has a guest, just make sure they bring their Eventbrite ticket in some form. Email on their phone is fine. We just need to see it. We'll hand you out a couple drink tickets when you get in, and then we'll have a great night. We do, for those who want a lower key option, a little quieter, less boozy option, we will

be hosting a board game night at the Marriott. There's details in the Sked app. It's a small room. So the reason that event is only set for 20 people is because that's about what will comfortably fit in that room, but you're welcome to make your own choice. You're welcome to start at one and go to the other. It's fine. You don't have to do either or, whatever you like to do.

But it's just a great time to blow off a little steam, get out of the building for a little bit, go talk to people and shake hands. And then Thursday, more breakout sessions culminating in IronScripter. Now, is anyone not aware of IronScripter? Okay. So this is a big team coding competition. If you have been paying attention, like the first of our prelude challenges went up on

IronScripter.us yesterday morning. So there's a second prelude today. Someone passed out sample solutions. I saw a couple pieces of sample solution paper floating around out there. So look out for that. These are teams, though. You've got your three teams, Daybreak, Flawless, and Battle, and you can join whichever

one you want. There are some stampers so that you can stamp your logo, your faction logo, and your badge, and your other faction team members can find you. There are some stickers. If you didn't get your faction's sticker, it's fine. I've got more, and we'll hand them out Thursday at the event. We have a beautiful trophy that's like the size of a baby child.

It's enormous and very fragile. So we'll have that on display so you can see it tomorrow. And the winning faction each year will have a little piece added to that trophy every year. So it's like a perpetual trophy, and we're going to do this every single year. So it's a one-hour coding competition. It's going to be a blast.

Make sure you show up. Bring a machine to work on. You're allowed to collaborate with off-site people. Figure out how to make that happen. Start looking for the members of your faction, shake hands, exchange names, and start to figure out how you're going to tackle this thing because it's going to be awesome.

Some fun facts. I know a little early on, about halfway through the registration process, we sent out a little demographic survey, and I just wanted to share some of that with you. Anyone interested in knowing who else is here, where they're from, all that? Yeah? Yeah? So let's start with this. It's our biggest event ever, 365 of you, plus some team members, plus bartenders and servers and all that.

It's a big deal. For those of us who remember the 90-person first time, looking out and seeing this many people is absolutely just intimidating as heck. I can't even tell you how amazed we are that you decided to be here. About half of you have a job title that roughly correlates to systems engineer.

Like, we tried to normalize some of the job titles, but here was the fun thing. I didn't expect this. Almost a third have a title that is either roughly DevOps engineer or automation engineer. That means roughly a third of you are doing something with PowerShell full-time. Who is that? Yep.

How amazing is that? Ten years ago, that would never have been a thing. And now it's almost a third of our audience. Just, it's amazing. About 20% of you come from technology-related companies, 16% education, 16% finance, and then it kind of breaks down into smaller numbers. The point being, there's a diverse crowd here.

Whatever challenges you're facing back at work, this is a great place to get some different perspective. Talk to each other about what you're dealing with, about what's challenging, because someone in a totally different field may have just, because of their background, tackled it in a totally different way, and you may go, oh my god, we should try that.

Let's talk more about that. Right, that's the whole point of being here. We're trying to record all the sessions. Like today, we're recording everything. All four of our breakout tracks will nominally be recorded if we can get all the magic to line up. But who cares about that, because you're here. And this is where you can get all those side conversations that really make this valuable. It's a big community.

It's global and it's growing. About 84% of you are from North America, 13% from Western Europe, and about 3% from the Asia-Pacific region. People have flown in from like Australia and Singapore and places. That is, it just kills me. I'm so proud that this is happening, because it, again, it just gives us more perspective and broader perspective.

So talk to people, introduce yourself, ask where they're from. Forty-five speakers, so most speakers we've ever had by a fairly big margin, plus the folks from the PowerShell team who are going to be presenting. We've got a number of different sessions that they're putting on. So a ton of variety. How many of you, by a show of hands, are having a tough time picking what to see in each slot?

Excellent. Winning. Right? Do bear in mind that we need, so when you go to those session rooms, if you have chosen a crowded one, we need your butt to be in a chair, not on the floor, not standing in front of an aisle way or anything else.

It's a fire code thing. The fire code guy lives across the street. So it's important he knows we're here. So if the room is full, please try and select something different and rely on the recording. Our first ever iron scripter this year, talked about that a little bit. I know we did a scripting competition a few years ago, but it was kind of an individual thing.

And we wanted to do something that was more of a group thing. And I'll give you a little hint about what's going to happen. When we start the iron scripter, we're going to hand out the details of the challenge to each of the factions. And you're going to almost immediately have to have a leader, a team leader, ready to break it down into chunks and assign chunks to different teams.

Just like in the real world. And you're going to have to figure out how to collaborate and coordinate those teams. Because coding in PowerShell is not an individual effort. It's something that we all do as a group. And so start thinking about that, like how you're going to coordinate that logistics. What's beyond? So what comes after this? I'm going to talk a little bit more about our 2019 plans and some questions that we have

for you later today. So stick around for that. But just briefly, some changes that are happening. As I said, we fired Jason Helmick, because math. And our new CFO is James Petty, who's sitting right over here next to Jason. Wave.

James roughly knows what he's in for, so I feel pretty good about him. And he can do math. So that's a big thing. Will Anderson, with the camera, will be stepping in as our CEO. And I will be, Will does not know what he's in for. He and I will sort of be co-CEOing.

We have a goal this year of bringing in folks and learning how to teach our jobs to them. So we might do this with different folks for a few years at a time, because we want to start to build up our capability of bringing folks in the organization. Now, Will's already in the organization, but I've never taught anyone how to do what

I do to make all this happen. And so the act of making him do it will force us to document some things and learn how to teach this so that we can bring folks in. We want this to be sustainable for you guys. We don't want it to go away just because one person lost interest or can't do math. And then finally, Jeffrey Berndt will be stepping in to assist Christopher as our

logistics manager. So you'll see Jeffrey and Chris hanging out a lot and doing a lot of the same work because he's going to start picking that up. So we're kind of getting the next generation going. We're real proud of that. And please, you know, offer them your support, give them a hug if they need it, and be nice to them because they'll be stressed out. Next year, here are the dates, April 29, 30, May 1, May 2, 2019.

We will be back here in Bellevue. We do have some competition happening. The Marriott is interested in renting us the entire building for the week. We could fit over there, so we're going to look at it. We're going to do our due diligence as an organization.

So we will be somewhere in this downtown Bellevue area, even if it's not here at the How many of you are staying at the Marriott? That's a pretty hotel. So they could hold us, so we'll see how that goes. Next year, we set out on a mission originally to do deep dive content.

We were taking over from the PowerShell deep dives that had happened for a couple years under NetPro. And when Dell bought them, they were discontinuing that. And the team, as I said, Kenneth and Aaron came to us and said, look, we need more access to hardcore PowerShell people. Like, we need access to the people who are really,

really running the product through its paces. They said, you know, we go to TechEd, and that's fine, but it tends to be a little bit more entry level. And we're not getting these hardcore folks, so we need you to run this conference. This year, we decided to bring in a little bit more intermediate level content because we wanted to make it a more accessible event for more people.

And we've noticed, how many of you go to, well, not TechEd, Ignite. How many of you have been to Ignite? You notice there's not a lot of PowerShell content? It's like they got bored of it. It's not on the marketing agenda anymore, so they're like, eh, fine, whatever. So we realized that there's not a lot of places for a new person who's maybe used PowerShell a little bit but doesn't have the patterns and the practices, there's no place for that.

So next year, we're looking at running an on-ramp track. It'll actually be a separately ticketed event. It'll be the same price. They'll still come to our all day Monday thing. They'll join us for all of our evening parties and stuff and lightning demos. But apart from that, it'll be a bring-your-own-laptop, hands-on class. And it'll be taught by guys like Helmick, because it doesn't require math.

Myself, Jeff Hicks, Richard Sidaway. So we'll go in and really bring folks along and start to build, hopefully build, a pipeline of people who come in, do that, and then come back the next year and help participate in the main summit. And then become speakers on their third year and really just get the community spinning its own flywheel.

So we're gonna ask you on the post-event survey about that, because we don't know how to reach that audience. So we're gonna need your help, and we've got some details in the event survey you can watch out for, because we're gonna need you to recommend your entry-level colleagues, and so we'll try and gather some feedback on that.

And then next year, as always, we're continuing our attempt to bring you as much community engagement and peer networking as humanly possible. Real quick, and you can look around, hold your hands up for just a sec. Who's at their first summit? Wow, wow, wow, who's at your second?

Third, fourth, fifth, who's been to every summit in the US? Okay, that's amazing. So for the folks who've been here before, a quick round of applause. Do you find that the peer networking and the connections and

everything else is useful? Okay, so we'll do that, we'll keep doing that. Let's see, keep in mind that this is your event. This is not backed by a giant media company, this is just us. And I think it's one of the things that makes it such a good event for

those of us who put it on. Because you guys are us. I mean, you do the same job we do, you enjoy the same types of work environments that we do, and it keeps it cool. And with that in mind, I want you to remember that I know you're all introverts, but this is the place to just kill that part of your brain, at least for a little bit, like beat it into submission.

Here's the thing, I know when you come to an event like this, it's real easy just to kind of stand to the side and watch what's happening. It's maybe easy to get involved in a conversation with a couple of people. But when the crowd starts to get bigger, it's real easy just to kind of back it off a bit. Everyone's like that, you're all like that. We've heard it from every single person, well, I'm kind of an introvert, me too.

It's an act of will for us to stand up, not that will, it's an act of brain power to stand up on a stage and present to people. It's exhausting, anybody who does this, even if it's for one presentation, at the end of the day, you go home and you're like,

you're tired, you're burning energy being with people. I get it, but get over it, because this has got more PowerShell and DevOps and automation brain power in the building than you will find anywhere else. Take advantage of that, don't let your shyness get in the way.

How many of you are bad at remembering names? Like you introduce yourself and you immediately forget the name? Yep, me too. I am terrible about it, and the bigger the crowd, the worse I get, right? Cuz the back part of my brain is going, his name was Joe, and the exit's back there, the exit's back there. You can get out that way if you have to. The exit's, what was his name, right? It's fine, just say, hey, I'm bad with names.

Introduce yourself again, because they probably forgot yours, and that's why we have the badges, but just keep introducing yourself. A few names will stick, a few new names stick every year with me. It's okay, right? None of us are any, we're all in the same situation, so take advantage, conquer the introversion. Some quick housekeeping, there is no smoking or vaping inside the building.

And when we're upstairs for the next three days, there is no smoking or vaping on that outdoor Rainier Terrace. Please don't put the staff of the venue or summit in the awkward position of having to tell you to knock it off. There's no draping power cords across any aisle way, that includes up along the walls.

There's no leaning your equipment against the wall so it can charge. This does mean you, this is a big deal, fire marshals get really bent out of shape about this. And please wear your badge at all times. What else we got? After your sessions, this is important because we, you notice we schedule things pretty tight. After a session, please let the presenter just get off the stage.

Gently follow them to the common area. Gently usher them toward room 403, which we have got equipped with nice cushy chairs and everything else, and carry on your discussions there. That lets the next presenter start to get set up.

And the AV stuff can be finicky, so they need that time and as much of it as they can get. And it also moves the noise out of that balcony area upstairs. And if you've not been here before, you'll see what I mean tomorrow. So just get it away from those and, and try and head over to 403, or to the very ends of the hallway at least. So that the next session can get going in a quiet fashion.

Really do appreciate that. So, we're going to take a little break. And is everybody okay if Jeffrey Snover comes up and talks? All right. Guys, we'll bring him up. We're going to do a little break so you can have a bio break or, or

grab a water or whatever else. But before we do that, just really quickly, know how much we appreciate you being here. Welcome to Summit.