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Happy New Year! 2023 had a lot of changes for me. In this post, I will discuss accomplishments, posts, presentations, and events that I participated in during the year.

alainassaf.com

I began the year with a revamped blog site based on Jekyll and hosted on GitHub pages. I spent the better parts of 2 months in the evenings converting years of WordPress posts to this new format. This added a lot of “new/old” content to my site and I saw my user counts go up by over 1000%. This is deceptive as my count for 2023 was a little over 2100 new users. I have a new workflow setup, so I hope to post more often and write about the large library of PowerShell scripts I have written over the years.

Posts

My top five posts for 2023 were:

Presentations

RTPSUG

In September, I presented at the Research Triangle Park PowerShell User Group. I spoke about my growth in blogging and PowerShell over time and I highlighted how I use PowerShell to orchestrate the creation of new blog posts for my blog.

Thrive-IT Workshop

In December, DJ Eshelman asked me to present at his I.T. Automation & Testing is for Smart People, Not Lazy People workshop. I talked about my team’s migration to Citrix AppLayering and how I leveraged Matthias Schlimm’s Application Check script to validate images every month after patching.

Events

  • I am a local Citrix User Group leader for Raleigh-Durham and I hosted 3 meetings in 2023.
    • Two in April and December, at a local brewery in Raleigh
    • One in June, at a local indoor mini-golf facility.
  • I attended a local Red Hat Summit presentation in September and got updated on all things Red Hat.
  • I was also happy to attend one of 2 final sessions of EUC legend Carl Webster’s Active Directory Masterclass. Truely a privilege and I gained a fantastic set of tools to help analyze Active Directory.

LinkedIn

I gained 386 new followers during 2023. I also posted over 50 times and received over 64,000+ impressions on those posts.

Career

In April, I redirected my professional focus from Citrix and End User Computing to the realms of automation and integration. This transition held significant importance for me, as I aimed to harness the full spectrum of skills I had acquired over time, encompassing automation through PowerShell and initiating my exploration into Cloud computing.

I also completed the UT’s McCombs School of Business Post Graduate Program in Cloud Computing. This was a very rewarding course, and I got a lot of exposure to AWS and Azure that elevated my understanding of Cloud technology in general and specifically how to leverage many services from both platforms.

Value for Value

If you received any value from reading this post, please buy me a coffee to show your support.

Thanks for Reading,
Alain Assaf