Welcome to the Cloudgnosis blog!
In this blog I am going to write about things that I think spark joy, and personal reflections on things related to software development and cloud engineering.This blog existed a few years back, and covered various topics around public clouds primarily. From that there was a spin-off to Tidy Cloud AWS, which was more focused on AWS specifically, and making cloud solutions in AWS less messy. The blog will get a restart here now, and cover other areas as well, compared to Tidy Cloud AWS.
Lately, I have found myself disillusioned with the state of cloud engineering, tooling, and ways of working in the cloud. We can improve, but messy environments fuel frustration.
This led me to think back to the “good old days”, before cloud, before distributed computing, before internet and the web. My first foray into computers and software development was in the 80s, in 1981 to be more precise. This was an age where many home computers appeared. My first experiences back then was with computers like ABC80 and Commodore Pet, and my first own computer was the Commodore VIC-20.
Compared to what we have now in computers, mobile phones, watches, and some smart devices at home, the raw capacity of these computers was not much. The tools were not as sophisticated as many of them are today. But one thing that many times was better than was the feedback loop.
Start the computer, and almost instantly it was ready to accept a command from you. Write some code, in BASIC, and you could get the results either right away, or easily run it and see what happened. It encouraged experimentation and exploration.If you got stuck, you read books, or talked to friends, tried something different - or just took time to think about the problem. Because there was no internet, Google search, Stack Overflow, ChatGPT.
Today, we can build things in software we could not dream about 40 years ago, and our choices on how to do that are extensive. 40 years ago, we had some feedback loops and simple decision patterns many people can barely dream about today.I strive to recapture the spirit of 80s computing, with its simplicity and swift feedback. Hopefully, we can combine this with modern era (cloud) computing as well.
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