Terraform is a very versatile tool to help automate your infrastructure and codify your infrastructure as code. With a large open source community and tons of providers across multiple cloud platforms it allows developers to create plans for spinning up infrastructure effortlessly. One thing I ran into that needed a little more effort was adding conditional steps to a configuration plan. Due to the complex nature of Terraform and how it attempts to plan out how it will execute your configuration it is a little more involved to get conditionals working.

I recently went through a painless transition from years of bash to fish shell in one evening. My bash setup has been stale for quite some time. I am mainly working in a bash terminal on a Mac and various Linux distributions. Bash, for me, has always been a bit of a mess to sort out the quirks of writing up scripts, loading in profile and configuration, and customizing the shell prompt. I had always put up with the quirks up until the other day when I decided to take the dive into Fish Shell.

If you are using AWS for anything, and security is on top of your mind, you may have run into some friction using the AWS services programatically. May companies require MFA to be set up just to access the AWS console. Some go even further by adding the constraint of requiring a group, or all users, to use MFA for programatic access to their account. If you have ever been put into this situation and tried to use the AWS APIs you know how it can become a burden to now do the things you are used to doing from simple CLI calls.

Appreciations are something we likely overlook on a day to day basis. Given enough time and thought to introspect on things in our lives like relationships, work, family, or hobbies we can quickly start to think of all the things we can, and should, give appreciation for. This can translate well into engineering teams that work closely together with each other.

Gitlab has been approaching the hosted VCS solution with a more robust and thought out handling of the entire release pipeline for code instead of the basic features of a git flow approach. Enter GitlabCI.

Ansible is a provisioning tool to easily help you get your infrastructure under control. One of the key elements in Ansible is a role. There are public roles to get you started quickly with Ansible over at Ansible Galaxy. One thing Ansible is sort of lacking is a strong testing approach for open source roles.

Hugo is a static site generator that has caught on for its simplicity and the fact it is built in Go. You can run it as a server or build the static site to host somewhere. If you are using Hugo to build a full site or just a blog you will most likely want to have some dynamic page setup for SEO or analytics. Luckily this is easy enough to do with Hugo.

With the recent addition of Atlas to the Hashicorp arsenal, Vagrant got an update to be integrated into Atlas for hosting your VM boxes and handling versioned updates. If you are still looking to have your boxes versioned and are hosting them yourself, or your company has them private, you can still achieve versioning your boxes with the latest Vagrant (1.7.2) and some manual work.

Go has been gaining a lot of popularity recently. With a lot of the success stories centered on the performance gains switching from other languages. For me a lot of the smaller features, that shows an attention to detail, which makes it enjoyable to code in.