When I travel, I enjoy exploring. I feel a certain amount of reverence as I look up and out at bridges and buildings. The people who dreamed and implemented these feats may be long gone, and yet their work stands. Software is so different from these physical monuments in size or lifespan. We're not building for permanence, and yet we do need to think about building to stand and support all the people who use and depend on it.
In late 2018 when I joined Microsoft, I brought years of experience from operations, site reliability engineering, and devops to the team, but zero experience with Azure. As I've been building up my Azure knowledge, I found missing information about how to create for production.
I enjoy learning new technology, but often it feels like, to understand "the cool stuff", there is a whole host of other dependent tools and terminology to learn. Sometimes it can feel like with every new topic more topics get added to the infinitely growing need to understand list. Exploratory learning can be fun, and I learn a lot. Other times, it can feel like a complete drain, and I forget what I initially was trying to learn.
This series is about taking my years of operations experience and add it to learning Azure to help folks understand some of the key fundamentals of building operable applications, tools, and services. For this series, each topic will be as small as I can make it to limit the number of new concepts I'm introducing at any one point. By focusing on specific fundamentals, it will help me have places to point to when I write more complex topics that rely on these building blocks.
I don't imagine that every post will be fascinating, but they will all be super relevant to building quality operable software. So this series won't teach you how to display the weather with serverless or control your light with IoT but it will help you understand some of the areas where you need to think about risk management in your design.
What's in this Series?
I don't know quite yet! I'm learning Azure, and as I discover building blocks, I'll update this post. Do you have thoughts and ideas about topics you'd like to understand? What methods do you use to learn new complex topics?
1 - Building Solid Foundations for Operable Applications, Tools, and Services
2 - You gotta keep privileges separated
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