I have historically had a hard time sticking to things. I have a tendency to pick up a new tool or habit and then just as quickly put it down. One of the things I most admire in my wife is her discipline. She is up at 4:30am most mornings to swim in icy Lake Washington, rain or shine, year-round. I have been fortunate to have succeeded despite not being a particularly disciplined person, but as I approach 30 I think it’s as good a milestone as any to make a change.

Modern cloud providers put an unbelievably powerful set of tools in the hands of engineers, but it can be a real pain to set up and manage your own cloud infrastructure. Terraform is an open source tool developed by HashiCorp which allows you to declare your infrastructure in code, manage it with version control, and deploy it to the cloud. In the following short tutorial, we’ll go through setting up Terraform and we’ll create a single resource on Azure using Terraform.

Resolving engineering problems can be incredibly difficult, one thing that can help is having a structured approach to how you solve those problems. This post is going to present a path to solving problems as a member of a software engineering organization. To be clear, the type of problem solving I’m referring to is the “Oh no, I have absolutely no idea” feeling when you first open a feedback ticket against a code base with which you only have a passing familiarity.