pdx

A common problem when provisioning infrastructure with Terraform is the inherent bootstrapping problem imposed by the fact that Terraform needs some kind of storage to store its state. In an ideal world Terraform would be able to provision its state backends using infrastructure as code defined in Terraform itself. In a more real world you are often confronted with the question “Where to store the initial state needed to provision the first resources? [Read More]

Referring to a previous post about developer experience, a re-occurring need when writing automation and/or glue code for software or infrastructure projects is to ensure all required software is installed on the execution machine. A lot of software exists to achieve this goal, e.g. NixOS or asdf, but sometimes a little bash can be enough to get the same results. Solidblocks Shell Software provides a small set of easy to use functions to install commonly used software for infrastructure projects. [Read More]

The first question after cloning a new repository often is: “How do I build this thing?”, immediately followed by “…and how do I run this thing?”. There may be a README.MD somewhere with some information about some commands that you can run, but this information tends to get outdated very fast. A simple shell script can serve as an entrypoint for all tasks needed to work with the content of a repository. [Read More]

A personal pet peeve of mine when joining a new project or environment is the developer experience (DX). Under this rather wide umbrella term I summarize everything that is needed to get a project running, tested and deployed apart from the actual business code itself. Starting on the local development environment setup, over being able to build and test locally to finally being able to deploy. In the following series of posts I will try to visit some recurring problems and obstacles and give and some heavily opinionated and patterns on how to solve them. [Read More]