The PowerShell Podcast

Inside the PowerShell Working Groups with Ryan Yates

Fresh off a PowerShell Wednesday session on Windows PowerShell versus PowerShell 7, Andrew Pla sits down with Ryan Yates, a longtime pillar of the UK PowerShell community and member of three PowerShell Working Groups (Cmdlets, Engine, and Interactive UX). Ryan pulls back the curtain on what working group members actually do, from triaging issues and reviewing PRs to deciding how bugs and enhancements should be implemented before the community picks up the work.

The conversation rewinds to Ryan's early days as an IT apprentice at Barclays, where supporting SharePoint without a Visual Studio license led him straight to PowerShell and a lifelong love of breaking things to learn how they work. Ryan also shares his take on PowerShellGet and PackageManagement headaches, why PSResourceGet and DSC v3 point to a better future, how AI's cost barrier affects everyday PowerShell users, and his dream of turning old devices into a local AI compute farm.

Things wrap up with a rapid-fire lightning round covering underrated cmdlets, favorite automatic variables, the most rewritten code block in PowerShell history, and a heartfelt call for more community eyes on the PowerShell repository.