Day One – AWS Vagrant (see project overview here)
Today is the first day that I really have nothing to do for anyone else and I am going to focus only on my growth. I’m excited about it and worried. When you are counting solely on yourself, yourself has to step up and do stuff! Of course, that’s everyday, but there is no external pressure, so I have to apply it.
I’ll start the Pluralsight AWS courses and discuss the highlights/lowlights.
For AWS, I chose the “AWS Certified Developer – Associate (DVA-C01)” path. Starting out with intro courses by Ryan Lewis. Ryan’s intro course was the right amount of overview. The second course in the path is actually going to require some development using development tools, so I’ve decided to take a side step and do a bit of vagrant learning. I’ll need Vagrant or Virtual Environment or some way to isolate my development environment. I’ve used both, but mostly Vagrant.
About face before I even start!
Donnie used Vagrant at ContractSafe and it’s a good way to keep all of the stuff you need for your machine isolated. He’s smart, so I’ll follow his lead.
Turns out, Pluralsight has a course “Introduction To Versioning Environments With Vagrant” by Wes Higbee, so I’ll just take that, first. This course has been very helpful. Using the information Wes provides (in a step-by-step video), I have set up a vagrant machine on my Mac with Nginx as a web server. He takes us through the steps of scripting everything we modify on the base Ubuntu machine so that it can be recreated from scratch. I’ve not used Nginx before at all, but his course got me up and running with a usable web-site.
One of the great things about using a Vagrant box is that you can develop on your host machine using whatever IDE you like and share the source code with the Vagrant machine. I’m using Sublime Text as my IDE. Wes’s course explains how to set vagrant up and how it works with just the right level of detail. Good course!
The Hubot section of the course didn’t seem to apply to me, so I skipped it. I considered viewing the section on Local Development Databases, but I don’t feel that I’m ready for that topic, yet, and this may not be the best place to get that information (not sure).
I want to take a trip down the Nginx rabbit hole, but I started this whole learning experience with AWS as my goal. So, I think having a good vagrant machine that I can use to start my AWS training is where I had hoped to be when I started my first day. Already, one step backward, but I feel it was a good move to take this backward step!
No, I did not do what I planned on this day! On to Day two.