Winter Scripting Games 2014 – Let me present you the “Posh Monks” !

So before even to start to talk about coding or anything like that, I will first introduce you to our team members, and how we recruted them in this first blog post. In a second part/ blog post I will talk about the event it self. The scenario, what was asked of us, and how we splitted the worked and atributed it to the different team members. As a third part/blog post, I will explain how we got organized, how we worked, and how we wrote and share our code. And as a 4th part / blog post, I will explain how we uploaded our script and how we managed to work on the feedback of the different coaches.

• The PowerShell Winter Scripting Games 2014

So before even going into the details of our organisation, I would like to have a little word about the organization of the “Winter Scripting Games “ it self.

So this year, the “Winter Scripting Games” were pretty different from my previous experiences of the “Scripting games” that i had before.

Indeed, I have participated in the “Advanced” category of the “Scripting Games 2012” (You can find my scripts & results here) and shortly in the “Scripting Games 2013″  but I moved to Switzerland in the same moment, and even though I tried to do my best, moving and participating in the Scripting games is quite impossible ;).

The previous scripting games were all “single” contestant and the scenarios were all defined for one single scripter. In the previous event, we had one week in order write a script that could be more or less complex, including all the PowerShell best practices.

This year’s “Winter Scripting Games” included a notion that has never been present before : “Team Work !”

Indeed, this year (or should I say, “This Winter” ? ) the fact that we need to organize a team and share the workload made quite a change to the scripting games.

Judging 

Also, the judging system changed has well. In the previous years, the selected PowerShell MVP’s would only look into our code after the submission date. This means that small things like syntax errors, typos etc… could be present, and could become a reason for loosing points. This year’s event Judges will still rate our submissions at the due dates, and note note our scripts before that due date, but they introduced something new this year : “Coaches”.

Coaches

Coaches, are like a neutral friend that will help us by reading our code, check how we got organized, give us feedback etc… This neutral friend, or should I say our neutral “Friends“, provides us help and guidances throughout the scripting games

There is also a “Head Coach” that will manage all the coaches. And the Head coach is nobody else more then “Mike F Robbins”  The winner of the Scripting Games 2013 !

He published the list of the “Winter Scripting Games 2014” coaches on his blog available here. These coaches have access to all the entries from all the teams and will be able to help, guide, give tips, hints, answer questions, through out the scripting games.

Team

Our team is composed of 6 (Super cool;)) members:

• Stéphane van Gulick (my self, hey nice to meet you ! :))
• Francois Xavier Cat (The “famous” Lazy Win Admin”)
• Allister Phillipe
• Benjamin Rouleau
• Guido Basilio de Oliveira
• Dexter Deepack

At first, we had only 4 members present in our time, but before the first event  started (the practice event actually), A blog post was written by one of  the organisers, saying that there were actually no possibilities to control who would join your team once you created it..; We decided then to recrute two new members to make it 6, and be sure all 6 of the team members will be participating and would have fun  🙂

Actually, once the practice event started, the Winter Scripting games organisers made changes in the rules (Their sit settings ?) and managed to give us the possiblity to control would join our teams (with a secret team ID). Which actually didn’t matter for us anymore since we had managed to create a kick ass team full with super motivated people from various different places !!! 😀 India, Switzerland, Canada, France and Brazil. Now that’s quite International if you ask me ! 🙂

Keep tuned for the next blog post concerning the event it self called “Server Inventory”.