Blog Post

Work Smarter Not Harder – Creativity: Technical Wizardry

Dujon Walsham • Feb 18, 2019

How to pick up stuff quickly

I have been asked a few times as to how I have been able to obtain new skills, technologies and experience in such quick speeds and also with deep knowledge at the same time.

And the answer is .....I really have no idea! well to be fair I've got a little bit but it's quite difficult to explain as when you’re driven enough you don't really notice exactly the work you put in and whilst it may seem quick to the outside looking in, it really feels like a slow grind to make it where you want to be.

Technical Wizardry
This is really a big element in how I'm able to pick up and learn a lot of new things.

To breakdown the meaning, it just comes to the art of creativity. And just wanting to do certain things.

For example, in projects, solutions or any kind of technical or business objective you may be expected to design something which may not be remotely possible and can come across many stumbling blocks. Mostly it tends to be technologies in which others would specialise in or even some that little to no one knows at all.

This can be seen as just using initiative to try and understand it more, but this is where the creativity kicks in. In my cases it normally leads down the path of developer/devOps type of stumbling blocks, everything from PowerShell/VBScript/SQL/XML/C#/C+

Basically I'm saying the quickest way to pick up new things is to have objectives or yourself try to think of something you want to perform that sounds ridiculous or farfetched.

One of the examples I can give was how I picked up more on PowerShell. I thought I would come up with the idea of writing a script which would be able to the following

1. Open a web page
2. Connect to my private media server
3. Download my music
4. Organize it by Artist, Album, Year, Genre, Compilation
5. Grab all of the Album Art and map to them

just a little something to expand the mind. Hell I even had a script which could count how many items were in the fridge.

Another element that comes with Technical Wizardry is that EVERY and ANY type of requirement can be done. Whether it can be done out of the box or not

and that's really the core drive of the creative side and developing of skills on a broader scale

Next part will focus more on the artillery of the technical skillset which will be coming vert soon


by D Walsham 13 Dec, 2021
Looking through the current SQL Server topology and how it affects our decision
by D Walsham 07 Oct, 2021
Introduction
by D Walsham 06 Oct, 2021
Introduction
by D Walsham 12 Aug, 2021
All the parts of the series we went into great detail about how we analyse an end to end solution and how we would design a solution in which would allow us to build endpoints without SCCM being a dependency. Whilst we did this, there is another scenario which we have not touched on yet, which is the hybrid scenarios. In a perfect world ideally you would have your Azure Active Directory within the cloud, every machine meets the recommended requirements for Windows 10, everything is imported into Intune/Autopilot and everyone is happy. But we know this isn't realistic in all cases. Many organisations cannot just simply up and go from on-premise into the cloud therefore the checkpoint here is of course getting into hybrid solutions such as; Co-Management Between Intune and SCCM Hybrid AD with Azure AD and On-Premise AD syncing together These things can play a very interesting part in how you would tackle this if you envisage the next step in the blueprint is to be in a position in which you can build and manage endpoints soley within Intune. With this final part of the series we will go in-depth in how the common hybrid setups look like and how we go about moving into the next step of being able to manage and build devices without SCCM.
by D Walsham 29 Jul, 2021
In continuation from the previous part where we had discussed how we create the "on site" piece of the solution, this was the part which would allow us to get our endpoints into a state in which they would essentially be ready to go through the Autopilot process. Which leaves our next piece of the puzzle, to begin the configuration of the actual backend side that resides within our Endpoint Management console. And you will see how everything ties up together to satisfy the full end to end process of getting an unknown (or known) device to proceed thorough the whole workflow to be finally managed by Intune without the aid of SCCM taking part in any of the prerequisites or preparation at hand.
by D Walsham 15 Jul, 2021
In this part we are now going to look into the technical step by step points on how we put everything together. In the previous part we spoke about the structure of how we would asses whether a machine was actually ready to be built with Autopilot or not with a build checklist process which would step through all areas which would cover an endpoints eligibility. Now with everything planned out we finally want to step into making things reality by putting everything together.
by D Walsham 02 Jul, 2021
When it comes to managing your endpoints in endpoint manager, one of the things you may be looking to do is to get all of your Intune registered machines to also be enrolled as Autopilot devices. Now we can of course just have the deployment profile deployed to all machines and then hit the "Convert targeted machines to autopilot" but this might not necessarily be feasible for every client. We may want to perform some due diligence first so we can at least understand what devices in Intune are not in Autopilot.
Show More
Share by: