Jeffrey Snover Promoted to Microsoft Technical Fellow
Microsoft has promoted Windows PowerShell inventor Jeffrey Snover to Technical Fellow.
Snover previously was a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer, another esteemed Microsoft title, although his new role is a step up. Snover joins an exclusive group of the company's top engineers. He acknowledged the news on Twitter:
"Bad news: I'll never get another promotion Good news: I've been promoted to Technical Fellow (there's nothing above that)."
Many tweeted in response that it was a promotion long overdue and noted the irony (as did Snover) that there's only one way to go but down, a direction he actually took years ago, voluntarily when he accepted a demotion so he could further his efforts in advancing Windows PowerShell.
Lately Snover has been promoting Microsoft's DevOps vision, partly enabled by Windows Server 2016, which includes a headless Nano Server. His main role at Microsoft has been to improve Windows Server management with system automation and orchestration across platforms. That management effort has centered on PowerShell and a GUI-less Windows Server 2016, in part. At Microsoft conferences and even at this past spring's ChefConf, Snover has evangelized regarding Desired State Configuration (a PowerShell push-pull method for keeping system configurations in check) and management APIs to enable cross-platform automation and configuration management using PowerShell.
Snover first started talking up the need for automation 13 years ago with his Monad Manifesto, which called on IT pros to create automation scripts using Windows PowerShell. In a recent interview with Redmond, Snover explained why he's making that same case to developers as part of the DevOps vision.
"It's a logical next step," he said. "One of the things I see is that a number of the configuration tasks currently done by operators late in the process are going to move forward and be done by developers as part of the build process."
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 09/02/2015 at 2:18 PM