Being made redundant from a position where I defined patterns and practices for a high-performance team, I decided to take the leap to create my own startup. As I write now, this has felt like a violent acceleration of the clock. One day you feel the safety of an established enterprise; the next, there I am, standing on a clean slate. When I finally received my new laptop last week, I felt the sudden urge to rush, install the software I needed, and start churning out lines of code.
But my own discipline over the years took over - true craftsmanship rejects the illusion of hurried progress.
Years ago, I learned a fundamental lesson in cloud architecture: refuse click-ops and always rely on Infrastructure as Code (IaC) as your source of truth. Clicking through console windows to provision a database, where you instantly forget the exact steps you just took, builds technical debt that cannot be tracked, audited, or most crucially, reliably reproduced.
I had actually meant to start one week prior, but as I received my refurbished laptop, there was an issue that meant I needed to return the machine for repair. This meant I had to wipe it and wait over a week for repairs.
This taught me something: why not apply the same discipline of IaC to your own local environment? If "click-ops" is a sin in the cloud, then clicking through manual installers and executing rogue brew commands should be too.
