Preface

Way back in 2012, some six years after Windows PowerShell was born, Jeff and I wrote Learn Windows PowerShell Toolmaking in a Month of Lunches. The word toolmaking was important to us. My first job out of high school was working as an aircraft mechanic, and one of the first trades I was exposed to was the machine shop. Imagine a hot, humid warehouse in Norfolk, Virginia, full of noisy machines chipping away at chunks of metal. Machinists would spend hours, sometimes, setting up a milling machine with various tools and dies—fancy drill and router bits, basically—that would carve a block of metal into a useful aircraft part. You went home with your hair full of metal chips, your skin covered in lubricants, and your ears ringing from all the noise. I swore I didn’t want to become one of these tool users. Of course someone has to wield the tools, and there’s nothing wrong with it. I just didn’t want it to be me.

But tucked away at the back of the warehouse was a small, enclosed, air-conditioned office. The men and women there wore dress shirts and sat in front of computers all day, designing the tools and dies the machinists used. These tool and die makers, or toolmakers, got paid more, had a better work environment, and generally had—in my post-teenager view—better lives. I promised myself that in order to escape my personal hellhole of a workplace, I’d work hard to become one of them.