We're All Insane, and That's Our Superpower
“You are all insane.”
That was Jeffrey Snover’s official diagnosis at this year’s PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit. On its face it might sound like an insult, but it was actually something more profound: a reminder that our model of reality is often incomplete. We decide what’s “possible” based on outdated constraints, and then we spend our careers operating within those limits long after the constraints have disappeared.
Coming into my first Summit, I was absolutely guilty of this. I had a narrow, limiting view of what I could contribute. After a week of demos, sessions, and more community spirit than I knew what to do with, I’m leaving with a completely new theory of success. Turns out the only thing I was missing was a ticket.
Fighting the Imposter: Facing the Frontier
I made a promise to myself going in: put yourself out there. That meant fighting off a fairly spectacular wave of imposter syndrome to sign up for lightning demos.
On PowerShell Wednesday, I kicked things off geeking out over PowerShell scanners and using PSCustomObject to structure data for endpoint management reports. Fun stuff, low stakes. Then the main Summit demos arrived and the stakes got a little harder to ignore.
My project, ModuleExplorer, is a Terminal User Interface (TUI) designed to help navigate modules with style and sanity. I thought I was ready. Then Phil Bossman informed me I was going first. Then I looked at the schedule and noticed Jeffrey Snover, father of PowerShell, was just a few spots down. Cool, cool, cool. I didn’t feel like I belonged on the list but there I was.
The crowd was incredibly encouraging, and it proved Snover’s point better than any slide could: the only thing stopping us from building polished, “real” applications is the ceiling we’ve constructed for ourselves. Getting my demo out of the way early turned out to be a gift. It freed me up to actually absorb the amazing things everyone else was building.
The Reality of the Gap-Filler
One of the most grounding sessions of the week came from Lucas Allman’s talk on “filling in the gaps.” He tackled the unglamorous reality of IT Operations head-on. We don’t always get clean APIs, cooperative vendors, or documentation that was written by someone who had actually used the product.
His stories about using Selenium to scrape web pages, or solving “I am human” captchas by picking pictures of dice, were genuinely funny. But they carried a real message underneath: innovation isn’t about building in a vacuum. It’s about being aggressively scrappy. PowerShell wasn’t built for a perfect world. It was built for the one we actually live in.
Whether it’s controlling physical circuits via FTDI boards or building out full homelab stacks with Home Assistant and Vaultwarden (shoutout to Frank Lesniak and Blake Cherry for that masterclass), we’re the ones who show up and bridge the gaps. Someone has to do it. Might as well be us.
Beyond Code: The Human Side of Insanity
The Summit also made space for the harder, more human side of building things.
Gilbert Sanchez gave a deeply relatable talk on neurodiversity and what he called the “open-source dopamine train.” It’s easy to get energized and ship a cool tool. It’s much harder to sustain it solo. The real takeaway was this: if you want to build something that lasts, build a community around it, not just a codebase. His talk left me genuinely motivated to get more involved in larger open-source projects. Which, for someone who showed up worried about cliques, feels like real progress.
The AI Frontier: From Certainty to Potential
AI was everywhere at Summit, but it wasn’t the breathless “robots are coming for your job” variety of hype. It was about expanding what’s possible.
Even Snover, a man who has probably forgotten more about the command line than most of us will ever know, used AI as a collaborator to scaffold a complex GUI in weeks.
The message was clear whether you’re hand-coding a TUI or using a large language model to bridge a gap in your skillset: the boundary of what a “PowerShell person” can build has moved dramatically. We’re shifting from the deterministic certainty of “Is” to the probabilistic potential of “ish.” That’s equal parts exciting and terrifying. Just remember, “ish” won’t cut it for everything. Probably don’t deploy “ish” to production on a Friday.
The Core Takeaway: Stop Planning in Prayer
If you’re sitting with imposter syndrome right now, telling yourself you’re not “dev” enough or “senior” enough to contribute, you’re just working with bad data. Your old reality is the only thing holding you back.
Summit 2026 proved that this community will show up for whatever you want to build. Stop waiting for perfect conditions or a clean, greenfield project. Those don’t exist anyway.
The action plan is simple:
- Jump in.
- Build the tool.
- Ask the “stupid” questions.
- Be scrappy.
- Lean on others.
The Part They Don’t Put in the Brochure
Going into this conference I had plenty of ideas about what it might be like, but nothing came close to what it actually was. As a first-timer, I quietly worried about walking into a week-long event where everyone already knew each other. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
From the moment I arrived at the welcome reception, Matt McElreath, my assigned Summit buddy, pulled me into the fold without hesitation. Throughout the week, no matter where the conversations took me, Matt was always a home base I could return to. His talks on tool building, error handling, and debugging were excellent too, but honestly it was that consistent warmth that made the difference early on.
That feeling only multiplied from there. Andrew Pla, someone I’d only ever known through a screen, was even better in person and wasted no time challenging me to grow. He’s the reason I stepped up for PowerShell Wednesday, and then he turned around and invited me onto his podcast. Phil Bossman was an absolute hype man after my lightning demo, offering the kind of genuine encouragement that makes you stand a little taller. Josh Hendricks and Steven Judd were the kind of people who drop wisdom so naturally you don’t realize how much you’ve absorbed until later. Kevin Marquette sat down with me over dinner and we talked about our journeys. His start looked a lot like mine, and that conversation meant more than he probably knows. He also brought his own machine to show off local LLMs with PowerShell MCPs, which was exactly the kind of aggressively scrappy energy the whole week embodied. And Christian Ritter turned out to be every bit as kind and genuine as I’d hoped, the sort of person who makes everyone around them feel seen.
By the end of the week I had tallied over 50 names of people who had left some kind of mark on me. The final night, I found myself at a quiet family-style dinner with Scott Lemonde, Clayton Tyger, and Chris Rivers. Nobody planned it. It just happened, which felt like the perfect encapsulation of the whole week.
I’m so grateful for every person who reached out, welcomed me in, and reminded me that this community isn’t something you observe from the outside. It’s something you step into.
See you all next year. I’ll be the one at the front of the line.