T-SQL Tuesday 108 – Non SQL Server Technologies

 

Words: 459

Time to read: ~ 3 minutes

It’s T-SQL Tuesday time! This month, we have the singular Malathi Mahadevan ( blog | twitter ) hosting for us all and challenging us to…

[…] pick one thing you want to learn that is not SQL Server. Write down ways and means to learn it and add it as another skill to your resume. If you are already learning it or know it – explain how you got there and how it has helped you. Your experience may help many others looking for guidance on this.

Now this brings me back to another T-SQL Tuesday that we had, hosted by Mal herself, all about our Learning Goals for this year, posted back in December 2017.

So I’m going to be talking about one of my “Personal” work goals from then.

Pester

There are a multitude of ways for you to learn Pester but here are the main 2 that I keep coming back to, plus an cheeky main one that everyone should look at:

1. The Pester Book, by Adam Bertram ( blog | twitter )

A resource that is great for getting to grips on Pester and one that I constantly go back to in order to refresh my knowledge of the topics on. It’s a Leanpub resource which is one of a few sites I’m fond of the site for their learning material and their transparency on where the money you spend is going to!

2. PowerShell Slack, #testing channel

I can’t even remember how I got started on this Slack workspace but this, and the SQL Server Community, are 2 of the 3 workspaces I have open at all times (the other being work).

Any sort of question that you have about pester can be asked there and potentially be answered by people obviously more knowledgeable but potentially also working on the Pester code base itself!

Some of the answers that they can have given me, I have never encountered anywhere else and deserve to be spread. I’ve got a few posts in the pipeline because of it and even created mini-blogs too.

3. foreach ($cmd in (Get-Command -Module Pester)) { help $cmd -Full }

Of course, you’re using Get-Help, right?

This will loop through all the commands in the Pester and show the help files attached to them all. Since I’m using help, it automatically pipes out to | more so it won’t move on without us prompting it to, just so you don’t get overwhelmed (try it out! Run Get-Content function:help)

So much done, so much more to do.

I’ve been working on the other two goals: Python and Speaking, but Pester is definitely one that I’ve made leaps and bounds in thanks to the learning material and help I’ve received.

Now to figure out what to learn and improve on for the next year!