How cloud services removed an irrational anxiety I had when I started as a developer
That's right, I'm a developer. I don't tell a lot of people.
Hello, if you haven’t read my blogs before, they get quite sarcastic and bitey. I’m nowhere near this slick in real life. That’s why I stick to words. Maybe that’s why programming is appealing to me. Words literally become action.
My start with developing stuff
The first time I ever touched a computing program it was a little language called QBasic. It was weird and I never got the point. Perhaps I was too young and too distracted. But I like to think that if I had followed through on learning QBasic at the ripe old age of 12, I could’ve been an engineer at Microsoft, in the 80s (for reference, I was born in 1997).
Apparently QBasic and basic HTML were the only things required of the Nepalese secondary school system for Computer Science, and I got good grades. But these experience weren’t really formative in my coding journey, but they gave me a basic idea of how people work with computers.
First Semester of College
I didn’t touch another programming language until my first semester of college where I majored in Computer Science (weird, I know). I realized that CS is a lot more than just coding and computers: it’s a lot of math and algebra. I honestly should have paid more attention to the math, its more important to me in the present day than anything else.
The first programming language they taught was C. C is …. interesting, it is a pioneer upon whose footsteps all other languages follow. In fact, when I started learning Rust, some of this stuff came in handy. But I learned the basics, assigning variables and functions and stuff. It was the most interesting part of that semester and it sparked my interest in programming.
Now, just to be clear, if you’ve studied Computer Science, coding may be part of your curriculum but that in no means makes it something you have to compulsorily deep dive into. I know a lot of friends and colleagues who work in ethical hacking, cloud solutions, networking and a bunch of other fields without being coders and they are great at their jobs.
The rest of college
Over the course of the next few years, I learned a bunch of programming and programming adjacent stuff. I learned the XAMPP stack and made my first web project with it (it was not good). I learned some Java after getting free lessons for drawing a bunch of faces on my hand. That was interesting, but all it taught me was how resource intensive IDEs can be.
It might sound dreary, but I actually did learn a lot from these experiences, JavaScript, PHP, how backends connect to frontends, how web pages are rendered and the like. Once I got into Python, that ignited my interest on the data side as well. I learned Flask and a bit of Django and that helped me get my foot through the door at a company.
The nagging anxiety
All through this process of learning stuff and growing, there was a nagging question in the back of my mind : “How does this stuff get to the Internet?”. And the answers I found at the time confused me even further. I didn’t have the slightest inkling on the cloud and how that worked or how people hosted sites on the Internet (still confuses me to this day).
I learned git and that was great for learning how to store code but that didn’t really answer my questions. The first crumb towards that answer came from a take home task that I got during my internship interview. They had us host a static HTML site in an S3 bucket. And when I looked through the process it was simple and really interesting at the time. But I thought to myself: “What about non-HTML stuff?”.
This lack of knowledge legitimately felt embarrassing, like I wasn’t in on some universally known secret. Well, that too came once I started getting into the groove of thing and figured out how to use AWS and the resources I had at hand for deploying applications.
I learned:
How to deploy a Django application on an NGINX server in an EC2 instance.
How to deploy a WordPress application on an Apache server.
How to deploy a static React application in an S3 bucket.
How to generate a secure HTTPS for that application with Amazon CloudFront.
How to deploy applications based on a pattern like rolling, blue/green, immutable and others.
How to deploy containers and endpoints for the containers.
How to instantly deploy NodeJS and Java applications on 8080 ports on VMs with a few basic commands.
How to not deploy anything at all and enjoy the benefits of serverless technologies.
And that helped. It introduced me to DevOps and SRE, it took me out of my “just a dev” zone and put me in a place where the possibilities of creativity and growth were endless.
What learning how to launch servers on AWS gave me
It gave me the insight I needed to become a better coder and understanding what better code means. To not hard code everything and to write code that is reusable and dynamic and doesn’t negatively impact the operations side. Whether I write that kind of code is up for debate (or review I should say), but it was a big part of my growth regardless.
To any developer who hasn’t seen their code go into deployment or seen their DevOps team work to deploy their code, I strongly recommend it since it is indicative of not only the quality of their work, but it will give them perspective on how to write better code in the future.