Next Stop, HashiCorp

Journal entry reflecting on past achievements and what's in store for the future. Self-assigning some Golang homework and some exploratory work into new territory.

Next Stop, HashiCorp
Next Stop, HashiCorp

Tomorrow, I'll be starting at HashiCorp as a Web Engineer. I'm particularly excited about this, and here's why.

Looking back

In my past 2.5 years at Capsule, I started as a Frontend Engineer but quickly made my way into every part of the stack. I worked pretty diligently towards this — met all of my sprint commitments/deadlines and did a ton of coding outside of work — and was also very fortunate to have been granted opportunities to join different teams and work on a variety of projects (greenfield and existing) by my managers and directors.

I went from writing only client-side code to: (Click to expand/collapse)
  • writing server-side TypeScript (Express BFF)
  • writing some server-side Python (Django monolith)
  • writing server-side Kotlin (Javalin microservices)
  • maintaining a multi-language AuthN/Z library (wrapper around AWS Cognito)
  • working with two Cloud Providers
    • AWS (day to day)
    • GCP (for an one-off MVP)
  • learning how to use kubectl to sanity-check and debug Jenkins/CodeFresh -> Kubernetes deployments/pods
  • writing some Terraform HCL for infrastructure (following plenty of existing examples)
  • implementing DynamoDB as an objectively superior alternative over the default RDS/PostgreSQL choice for a new microservice (proud of this one 😬)
    • saved money (pay-per-use serverless)
    • saved developer time (more mature Java/Kotlin tooling and no migrations needed)
  • creating an OCR functions-as-a-service for text extraction and image cropping
    • used GCP's AutoML Vision API
  • debugging an issue where requests originating from Java-based Kubernetes services were including duplicate host headers and getting rejected by an Nginx ingress using a newer Nginx version
    • enabled SRE / the entire engineering organization to upgrade and benefit from Nginx security updates

After tackling various parts of the stack, I still felt like I had one particular area that had considerable room for growth — DevOps. I never gained significant traction here, and still can't confidently say that I'd know what to expect in a DevOps role, but naturally, that makes me the most curious about it.

Looking forward

HashiCorp, being a company that offers cloud infrastructure automation tools like Terraform and Vault, could not be a more fitting next step.

And though I won't actually be working directly on any of those tools, being in close proximity to folks who do own those tools will be a great experience.

I've previously used Terraform for work, but barely scratched the surface and I've known about Vault as it was being adopted at my previous job, but didn't get a chance to use it personally. As for all of HashiCorp's other offerings, I have a lot of learning to do!

HashiCorp repositories

Here's a fun mini-project of some Github organization data that I pulled from their V4 API to recreate the pinned repositories as seen on https://github.com/hashicorp.

The JSON data is fetched via an authenticated request inside getStaticProps and passed to the scope of next-mdx-remote/serialize.

Pinned

consul

Consul is a distributed, highly available, and data center aware solution to connect and configure applications across dynamic, distributed infrastructure.

Go251644117

nomad

Nomad is an easy-to-use, flexible, and performant workload orchestrator that can deploy a mix of microservice, batch, containerized, and non-containerized applications. Nomad is easy to operate and scale and has native Consul and Vault integrations.

Go120581622

terraform

Terraform enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. It is an open source tool that codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned.

Go336687809

vagrant

Vagrant is a tool for building and distributing development environments.

Ruby241484280

vault

A tool for secrets management, encryption as a service, and privileged access management

Go251433458

packer

Packer is a tool for creating identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration.

Go138643246

GraphQL Query

Go do some homework

Looking at the above repos, 5/6 are written in Go so I took this as a sign that it would be a good time to start learning Go.

The first thing I googled was "go lambda function", and I learned that AWS has had an official Go lambda runtime since 2018. I guess I never noticed this.

So there were two paths I could take with this...

  1. Extend existing TypeScript AWS CDK code, and write one Go lambda function
  2. Start clean and simple, and write everything in Go — lambda function code and CDK code

...I chose the later because I also discovered, by chance, that the AWS CDK just announced Go support a few months ago, so I just decided, "Why not... I'll just YEET everything in Go."

I never noticed that fsharp and go were language options.

It's Go time 🤪!

Project

Here's a working repository of Go AWS CDK code to build and provision one basic Go lambda.

Here's what a barebones Go lambda function looks like.

Todos

...to further familiarize with Go syntax

More Todos

Aside from Go, there's a ton of other new (and old) things I want to check off.

  • Gain deeper understanding of Next.js inner workings
  • Figure out how serverless-nextjs works
    • consider refactoring this site to be deployed with it so that it can benefit from SSR instead of SSG, and be able to use other Next.js features like API routes, and Image
  • Learn some more HCL
  • Understand enough GCP and Azure to draw parallels to AWS
  • Use the Terraform CLI
  • Learn about Vault, Consul, Waypoint, etc.
  • Figure out how CLI's like Terraform and Vault are created and how they function under the hood
  • Committing more classic algorithms to memory

So much to learn...

So little time...

Special thanks to Kyle M. 🙇🏻‍♂️!

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