My Experience at PSU MacAdmins

Thank you MacAdmins Foundation

Let me get a Thank You out first. I was an awardee of the 2025 Community and Conference Grant from the MacAdmins Foundation which is the only reason I was able to go to the Conference so THANK YOU for the opportunity.

First Time? “No, not my first time” yes, my first time

This was my first time going to this conference and really any conference. What a wonderful experience. The community was great, the talks were awesome, and there was so much to do and learn.

I’m not sure what I expected, but attending as a person in a tier 2 support role and not being a full “MacAdmin”, I thought lots of information was going to go over my head or not be applicable to me because I’m not in a role matching the speaker, but talks were digestible and people I talked to understood I didn’t know everything but wanted to eagerly learn. Also a heavy dose of imposter syndrome because I don’t want to sound like a fool in front of people that I have tons of respect for.

What the heck did I do?

Well my favorite event of them all was Nate Walck’s NanoMDM hack-a-thon. Since the first time I heard about MDMs I instantly searched for free and/or open source to experiment with. Then I found about Apple Developer “roadblock” and my excitment dipped. I have since literally paid the fiddler so I can run an MDM @home (watch for a future blog post). Anyways, this workshop was by far my favorite because it gave me the confidence & inspiration to play with Nano and MDM/DDM. I also got to meet some great people, talk and ask questions in depth about topics/processes I didn’t understand more than asking a question at the end of talk in a big room.

The talk recordings are almost live so go to macadmins.psu.edu/conference/resources/ to check them out.

Here are my recommendations:

  • William Smith’s Scripting FUNdamentals for Mac admins
    • Very good for people new to general scripting and programming concepts, a bit slow for my liking but still got a lot of good information out of it.
    • Talkingmoose (William) is a great teacher and speaker.
  • Greg Neagle’s A Brief History of Password Syncing
    • So much information and “lore” packed into this one.
    • I had no idea about most of things that happened in the past so getting background on way modern day processes are the way they are was very eye opening.
  • Jacob Burley’s Automate all the things – fully automated OS and App patching
    • Fascinating to see how Jacob is able to improve processes and automate things that seems daunting to automate.
  • Beth Johnson’s swiftDialog for Overworked Mac Admins
    • Great introduction to swiftDialog with lots of tips of different flags to use that even seasoned admins that use swiftDialog didn’t know about.
  • Kevin Cox’s MDM Migration Demystified: Best Practices for macOS Admins
    • Kevin has done maybe 3 MDM migration so I think thats more than most and he knows a thing or two.
    • I mean c’mon its Kevin, also got PSU Ice Cream with him 😄
  • Ross Matsuda’s The Day After – Post-Installation Visibility Through Scripting
    • So many tips about how to improve script viability by being about to pull out information from packages

You really should just watch them all when they come out.

Summary

  • Would I go again? Duh Catch me next year hopefully giving a talk.

I appreciate all the work the organizing committee at PSU did to run this event. It has really helped me figure out what I want to do and how to achieve that.