Coding Geekette

While I'm a C# and ASP.NET dev by day, I am programming language and automation junkie. My current interests lie in PowerShell.  A friend of mine talked me into tech editing some PowerShell stuff of his, and that has since escalated into doing some writing.  As I write this technical PowerShell stuff and as I banter with the PowerShell MVPs on Twitter, for some reason, I feel odd.

While I can probably keep up with some of the PowerShell MVPs technically, there's something I've noticed.  There are no female PowerShell MVPs.  This is truly one concentration that reminds me just how rare women in tech are, especially in the IT realm.

For me personally, PowerShell caught my eye when I saw its syntax and made sense of it quickly.  My bash skills from Unix and my command prompt skills from DOS have been very helpful from a command-line experience.  My .NET developer skills have come in handy looking at creating custom providers and cmdlets.  PowerShell is just a natural fit for me.  

I'll continue to school my friend on some of these PowerShell things, especially when it comes to applying PowerShell to the real world.  But at the same time, I can't help to wonder... are there other WiITs... other Women in IT?  Are there any other female scripting addicts out there?

With 2011 arriving, this means that it's time to figure out what I want to focus on this year.  Here are a few things I'm looking into:

• Silverlight - no, it's not going way.  No, it's not dying.  It's still around, and I've got a bit of work to do with it.  So I'm looking forward to becoming a bit stronger with it this year.
• TDD - ah yes, the current hype in software development.  I'm finally coming around to figuring out how I can apply it to work and how to really understand it well.  This is the main thing I'm looking forward to learning about at CodeMash.
• Windows Phone Development - I have some app ideas that I'd like to build, and later this year, when my time frees up a bit more, I hope to get them out there.
• PowerShell - I've always had a love of scripting, and PowerShell just brings out that love even more.  All that wrediting I talk about on Twitter is writing and editing a book on PowerShell that's due out later this year.  I've learned quite a bit while writing, and I'm looking forward to building more custom cmdlets to help my fellow co-workers and maybe even the community.  We'll see what happens when my time frees up again.
• Agile - finally getting into this a lot more.  I'm excited because this process meshes better with my natural software development tendencies, much better than a chaotic waterfall.  I have a feeling I'll pick this up quickly.