The 2019 Iron Scripter Battle is complete and Faction Flawless has been declared the victor! This year’s battle, part of the PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit as usual, went down in a single venue. Unlike the previous year’s battle, this year each faction took up a part of our converted dining area. The factions quickly organized themselves to meet this year’s challenge. It was impressive to note that some factions had preliminary material in GitHub ready for battle. This was opportune because this year each faction had to submit their result via a public GitHub repository. This will most likely be the preferred mechanism for future events.
Results
The repositories have been forked and archived for posterity. If you are interested you can review each faction’s work.
The Dark Faction feels the competition is below them and did not participate, but that did not prevent their agents from infiltrating the proceedings. View any code you see with a bit of skepticism.
The main battle challenge is never intended to be completed. How each faction attacks the challenge is just as important as any code they produce. The challenge is also based on current trends. With that in mind, if you aren’t working with technologies and tools like GitHub, Pester, some sort of configuration management like Desired State Configuration, and Just Enough Administration, you are falling behind the curve. The judges for this year’s event, Don Jones, Jeffrey Snover, Jim Truher, and Paula Kingsley, felt that Flawless had an edge due to the high quality of their Pester tests.
Stay Sharp
If you didn’t participate in this year’s event, The Chairman hopes you will reconsider for 2020. This year, attendees from the new OnRamp program participated. While the challenge may appear daunting, it doesn’t require expert PowerShell coders. There were many reports on how much fun the event is and how much you can learn in a short time. To that end, The Chairman is intending to provide ongoing challenges and exercises throughout the year, with an eye towards plenty of beginning and intermediate level tasks. Keep an eye on this site and in Twitter.