I’ll have to admit that my coding practice has fallen off almost completely. The new job has me learning a lot of new things, most of them not code related. Taking over SCOM and Orchestrator has me learning a lot more about Automation outside of coding though I did make a Powershell port scanner that was pretty fun to use.

I’ll probably hop back on the coding bandwagon in January, now that NaNoWriMo is over and I’m a little more settled in during the day. I’m not counting on December being productive for anything. I will admit that I have pushed leisure time a bit more up the list of priorities, so I want to rework my schedule to get back to learning things at night without basically giving myself two jobs.

Analytics repeatedly tells me that the number of people who see these things is a number between 0-1 most days, so I’m content with a bit of navel gazing. SCOM and Orchestrator are fairly straightforward tech, and I’ve settled into them pretty well. It doesn’t hurt that I used a crappier and older version of SCOM, so the number of things fixed in the last three years was refreshing. That said, it's still a Microsoft product. It's kludgey, over-engineered, and in need of a manual that doesn't involve a week-long class. Orchestrator is a bit more accessible. Visual programming has always interested me, but often things that take three or four nodes to accomplish using the built-in tools take roughly ten lines of Powershell. I'm getting into the swing of it, but often I'm just scheduling Powershell through it.

I need to convert my VMWare experience into Citrix, which is surprisingly harder than I thought. Citrix seems to have changed a lot since I last worked on it. So it’s coming to it from a fresh angle. I also changed industries, from retail to health care. It’s a culture shock, not to mention that the company is a fraction of the size. That can be refreshing in some ways because my voice as an engineer carries more weight. On the other hand, sometimes you're cutting corners because the budget isn't there to do it any other way.

There’s not much exciting to write about and share code snippets from, though I did make two version of the port scanner. It returns all open ports and another that lets you specifically check an IP/DNS Name and a Port. I cribbed the .NET portion from this page and wrote my wrappers around it. Nothing fancy, but it did work.