Real Clients, Real Users Phase at Encora Apprenticeship — Week 1

Photo by Mohammad Rahmani on Unsplash

This post is part of a weekly assignment at Encora Apprentice and in this series, I’ll share my journey as a Software Engineer Apprentice. I hope these stories help and motivate others on their tech journey.

This week at Encora

A new phase, new learnings. This time I got to keep working with Terraform and research more about software failures and what we can do about them. Come take a look at this week’s new adventure!

Software and why it fails

This week I got to learn about software fails, but not in the production failures or bugs sense, but rather in a failed software project one.

Software projects have many factors that contribute to their success or failure, and as the project becomes bigger, it generates complexity that if not correctly managed, can lead to a failed project.

According to Robert N. Charette, some factors that contribute to failure are unrealistic project goals, bad estimations on time and resources, bad communication at any level of the project, poorly managed risks, poorly risk management, among others.

But aside from the economical consequences, failure also affects us on a more emotional and psychological level. Guy Winch explains to us the emotional injures from failure and how we can heal them.

Terraform Import

Throughout the apprenticeship program, I had the opportunity to work with Terraform and provision infrastructure to AWS. This process is the usual workflow described in the Terraform documentation:

Image from learn.hashicorp

However, sometimes we may need to manage the infrastructure that wasn’t created using Terraform. To do this, we can use the terraform import command, that allows us to import existing infrastructure and manage it using Terraform.

Image from learn.hashicorp

This process can be summarized as:

1. Locate the resource we want to import.
2. Use the terraform import command with the needed resource.
3. Create the configuration file and be sure that it matches the existing configuration.
4. Use terraform plan to check if everything is okay.
5. Provision of the infrastructure with terraform apply.

After this, we can start managing, changing, and destroying the infrastructure as we would do normally using Terraform.

Final thoughts

Learning from failure is one of the best sources of knowledge since we can learn what we can change and grow from there, but it is also important to come to peace with failure, emotionally and psychologically.

Also, this week was filled with exciting news and also new challenges and opportunities to learn! I’m eager to keep learning, this time about ECS clusters more in-depth!