Why you should make your PowerShell scripts publicly available

In my environment, I am the “PowerShell guy.” Just about everyone around me still does things the old fashion way and sometimes, I think they roll their eyes a little bit when I mention writing a script or doing it in PowerShell. Some people are coming around and they are learning with a bit of help from me (future post: Why you should teach at EVERY opportunity).

As a result of scripting in a bubble, I write a lot of scripts and functions for me and me alone. Because I know exactly how some piece of code works, I don’t really worry about all the help that should be in there, or worry about systems which are not setup the same as me. You know… I get sloppy! This is a bad thing.

The other day I participated in a short GitHub workshop which was just enough to get me interested and I’m hooked on the idea. Not only in the idea of having versioning and branching and all that great stuff, but putting *my* work, out “there.” Anyone can see what I put together. As a test, I created a repository for my “RBACHelper” module. This is a small module of a few functions which I find very helpful when working with Exchange Role Based Access Controls. Shortly after putting up the initial version (http://www.github.com/glaisne/RBACHelper) I realized there were large sections of commented code full of little tests I had in place while developing and there wasn’t much if any help information.

I quickly made some changes and updated my module because I was embarrassed by the less than professional appearance of my code. Now, if you are a person who writes code, hopefully you are the kind of coder who strives to be better all the time. Maybe we’ll get there, maybe the journey will never end. For me, making my code publicly available on a wider stage (outside my little blog here) will force me to be a better coder and not so disheveled.

I welcome the challenge, and I recommend you do too… if you want to be a better coder.

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