Fernando Corrales

Fernando Corrales is a cloud engineer with several years of IT experience in multinational companies. He’s worked extensively with VMware products, focusing on private cloud automation with PowerCLI and PowerShell, in addition to delivering PowerShell training for some of his recent employers. Fernando holds several technical degrees from the Tecnológico de Costa Rica and has a personal blog: fercorrales.com.

projects by Fernando Corrales

Parse Text Data with PowerShell

5 weeks · 5-7 hours per week average · INTERMEDIATE

XYZ Services Company, a consulting and outsourcing firm, recently experienced a massive failure in its IT infrastructure. As a PowerShell developer, you’ll help keep payroll and other critical processes running while its systems are down. Applying PowerShell best practices, you’ll write scripts that parse text data, convert it into objects, export objects to CSV files, generate formatted HTML reports, correct erroneous values in specific fields, replace text conditionally, identify and classify matching strings that satisfy specific conditions, and generate reports from multiple text files. By the end of this liveProject series, you’ll have practical experience working with simple to advanced regex expressions, the switch statement, and a variety of PowerShell cmdlets and operators that you can put to good use creating PowerShell objects, reports, and logs.

Report from Multiple Text Files

1 week · 4-6 hours per week · INTERMEDIATE

XYZ Services Company, the consulting and outsourcing firm you work for, is getting up and running after a massive IT infrastructure failure. In the meantime, the Human Resources department would like a report with basic staff data that it will use to distribute payslips to employees. As a PowerShell developer, you’ll use the switch statement and its file parameter to read and extract information from the source files provided by the company’s Active Directory before the system failed, build PowerShell objects, and export them into CSV format—helping HR provide proof of payment and putting your coworkers’ minds at ease.

Identify Similar String Patterns

1 week · 4-6 hours per week · INTERMEDIATE

XYZ Services Company, the consulting and outsourcing firm you work for, recently experienced a massive failure in its IT Infrastructure. While it’s working on getting the environment back up and running, the company urgently needs to identify potential vulnerabilities in the digital signatures used by the employees for two-factor authentication. Applying PowerShell scripting best practices, you’ll write a script that uses the switch statement and its regex parameter to extract a list of digital signatures from an input file, identify matching strings that satisfy specific conditions, classify them as required, and send them to log files. When you’re done, the information security officer will thank you for helping prevent future security issues.

Conditionally Replace Text

1 week · 4-6 hours per week · INTERMEDIATE

As a PowerShell developer, your critical mission is to help XYZ Services company, the consulting and outsourcing firm you work for, avoid payroll delays after a massive failure in its IT infrastructure. To meet a requirement in the input process to payroll, the HR department needs an update to the state field in the source file to be changed from the employee’s state of residence to the state of the office they report to. Using PowerShell best practices, you’ll write a script that uses the switch statement, PowerShell cmdlets, and advanced regex expressions to read the input file, return a list of the unique states within the file, replace the state value according to the predefined conditions—and keep those paychecks coming.

Find, Replace, and Extract Text

1 week · 6-8 hours per week · INTERMEDIATE

XYZ Services Company, a consulting and outsourcing firm, recently experienced a massive failure in its IT infrastructure. While it’s working on getting the environment up and running again, the marketing director wants to email partners a report that includes contact information for all the marketing staff. As a PowerShell developer, your task is to write a PowerShell script that extracts properties from the plain-text employee directory file, uses those properties to build a custom PowerShell object, and exports the object to a CSV file which you’ll use to generate an HTML report that’s formatted for the marketing director’s purpose. As a favor to the HR department, you’ll also write a PowerShell script that corrects values in a specific field within the source file and writes the edited content to a new file.

Break Strings into Substrings

1 week · 8-10 hours per week · INTERMEDIATE

You’re a PowerShell developer working for XYZ Services Company, a consulting and outsourcing firm that recently experienced a massive failure in its IT infrastructure. While it’s working on getting the environment back up and running, you’ve been given the critical, time-sensitive task of helping avoid payroll delays. The good news is the company’s employee directory has already been extracted. The bad news is it’s been saved as plain text files, a hard-to-work-with format for payroll purposes. Applying PowerShell best practices, you’ll write scripts that parse text data and convert it into objects that are in a payroll-manageable format.