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I loathe New Year’s Resolutions. I really do. Not because I’m not invested in the idea of personal development but rather because I’ve always had this idea that you should change when you’re ready to change, not because the calendar flips around. Of course, we all survived the Mayan Apocalypse, so I suppose we’re living on the borrowed time in which I should be avoiding goal-setting other than “live it up.” Being a skeptic, however, I’m more inclined to revisit my technical and professional goals.

Personally I’m rather disappointed in myself for still not being very good with the hideous PowerShell. Then again, I’m not managing a server farm and most administrative functions I execute are on a slightly smaller scale so I can still make use of the GUI tasks. Comfort and familiarity with the GUI tasks helps, yes, but sadly, I think I’m being lazier than necessary when it comes to advancing my PS abilities. It had become one of my benchmarks for 2012 (probably in June or so) and I haven’t achieved the level of competence I desired. Naturally, I’m able to use PowerShell just fine but remembering each and every useful cmdlet is nightmarish. (And typically I have a really good memory.)  Fortunately, I’m resilient and have been reading the a PowerShell Enthusiast blog. It helps.

Honestly, I’ve wondered for a while what others’ techniques for managing PowerShell have been, and whether they’ve been viable.

Working with Windows, I’ve naturally been trained to operate in a GUI far more than in command prompts. The usefulness of PS has been limited. So having occasion to recall long lists of cmdlets also probably means I’m not really getting work done the way I want to. Other than sitting in front of a list of tools and playing memory games, what sort of environment would be optimal for better PS recall?