We’ve all been there. You leave a high-growth environment where the tech stack was a marvel of modern engineering, and suddenly, you’re standing in front of a fresh index.html feeling like you need a riot shield to swat a fly.
When I left my last company, I carried their "Enterprise DNA" with me like a heavy backpack I didn't know how to take off. I looked at a simple side project—a Next.js app—and immediately thought: “I need a Terraform config for this.”
I spent 4 whole work days trying to debug deployments and then gave up and moved to vercel. Maybe AI could have saved this, but a good AI would instead have asked me to drop this bullshit and move to vercel
The Siren Song of Infrastructure-as-Code
The last project I touched was a behemoth. It used Terraform to provision Google Cloud resources for every micro-component: databases, Redis instances, load balancers, and IAM roles for a Next.js/Rails/Express hybrid. It was beautiful, it was scalable, and it was absolute overkill for what I was doing next.
I spent three days in a dark room:
- Dockerizing everything: Even the parts that didn't need a container.
- Debugging YAML: Fighting with whitespace and environment variables.
- Provisioning: Waiting for GCP to spin up resources that cost money before I’d even written a "Hello World" that anyone could see.
I was practicing Resume-Driven Development. I wasn't building a product; I was building a monument to my own perceived technical sophistication.
Resume Driven Development is great btw, but it should be done with things that are visibly impressive. Not with stuff that works when no one notices it (infra). When you're out to ship a product, you want to do it quick and efficiently instead of debugging tabs in yaml files for days.