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I feel like your question is like "Why are there flathead screwdrivers? Shouldn't craftsmen only accept phillips head screwdrivers, since they're superior?" The

by d_watt 4y ago

I feel like your question is like "Why are there flathead screwdrivers? Shouldn't craftsmen only accept phillips head screwdrivers, since they're superior?" The reality being there are a lot of flathead screws out there. An engineers job is to get stuff done and not fight an ideological battleground. The world is impure, and requires impure solutions. Terraform is a tool to get things done, and given the realities of managing stateful infrastructure it does a pretty good job of addressing the failure states of it.

impoppy 4y ago
Exactly. Explain me why do flathead screwdrivers exist, if there are phillips head screwdrivers. I don't have a problem with mastering a new tool, but I do have a problem with mastering a tool purpose and idea of which I do not fully understand.
- d_watt 4y ago
  > but I do have a problem with mastering a tool purpose and idea of which I do not fully understand I would suggest that the onus of learning this isn't on other people though. You can start with a baseline assumption that there is a reason these decisions are made. Assume other people are smart, rational actors, and that certain pressures and tradeoffs lead to the belief that the current strategies are the best we have for the state of things overall. The reason I say this, in particular, is that you questions and answers in this topic have felt close minded and defensive. I say this not as an insult, but highlighting that this is often how I approached things when I was early on in my career. I felt overwhelmed by all the things I needed to know, and wasn't even close to having a mental model of how all the things in a fully working piece of production software fit together. That imposter syndrome led to me discounting things I didn't understand because it was emotionally safer to feel like I knew better than to accept I was barely floating along. Was this thread about a good faith effort to understand why terraform is needed, or is it a rant for why you're mad you have to learn it?
  - impoppy 4y ago
    I dunno, I have this problem all the time. I feel powerless being presented to all those enormous pieces of software I have no idea how do they work. I guess it’s a form of procrastination, as the moment I stop thinking, investigating and learning beforehand and start actually working with the input I have — the actual progress starts. Edit: Phrasing.
    - d_watt 4y ago
      It makes sense, and the biggest ways to understand are to do what you're talking about and try and "do it better." As other commenters pointed out, as you make the bash script more and more complicated, you'll see why terraform is the way it is. You may even find ways to do it better, and then you can make your own project/competitor, or submit a change back to the open source project. However, in the mean time, it's always worth coming at these things with the generosity of mind to assume that smart people made tradeoffs for real reasons, and for your "day job" work in the frameworks adopted until you understand the problemspace well enough to give truly informed feedback on why to do something differently.

by d_watt 4y ago

impoppy 4y ago

Exactly. Explain me why do flathead screwdrivers exist, if there are phillips head screwdrivers. I don't have a problem with mastering a new tool, but I do have a problem with mastering a tool purpose and idea of which I do not fully understand.

d_watt 4y ago
> but I do have a problem with mastering a tool purpose and idea of which I do not fully understand I would suggest that the onus of learning this isn't on other people though. You can start with a baseline assumption that there is a reason these decisions are made. Assume other people are smart, rational actors, and that certain pressures and tradeoffs lead to the belief that the current strategies are the best we have for the state of things overall. The reason I say this, in particular, is that you questions and answers in this topic have felt close minded and defensive. I say this not as an insult, but highlighting that this is often how I approached things when I was early on in my career. I felt overwhelmed by all the things I needed to know, and wasn't even close to having a mental model of how all the things in a fully working piece of production software fit together. That imposter syndrome led to me discounting things I didn't understand because it was emotionally safer to feel like I knew better than to accept I was barely floating along. Was this thread about a good faith effort to understand why terraform is needed, or is it a rant for why you're mad you have to learn it?
- impoppy 4y ago
  I dunno, I have this problem all the time. I feel powerless being presented to all those enormous pieces of software I have no idea how do they work. I guess it’s a form of procrastination, as the moment I stop thinking, investigating and learning beforehand and start actually working with the input I have — the actual progress starts. Edit: Phrasing.
  - d_watt 4y ago
    It makes sense, and the biggest ways to understand are to do what you're talking about and try and "do it better." As other commenters pointed out, as you make the bash script more and more complicated, you'll see why terraform is the way it is. You may even find ways to do it better, and then you can make your own project/competitor, or submit a change back to the open source project. However, in the mean time, it's always worth coming at these things with the generosity of mind to assume that smart people made tradeoffs for real reasons, and for your "day job" work in the frameworks adopted until you understand the problemspace well enough to give truly informed feedback on why to do something differently.