paddy carver
This post was written more than five years ago. I may still stand by it, but I may not. I try to grow as a person over time, and that inevitably means some of the stuff I wrote or thought before is embarrassing now, just like the things I write and think now will hopefully embarrass me in the future. I try to leave that old content up to preserve links and not pretend it didn’t happen, but that doesn’t mean I still endorse it. If you’re curious whether I still stand by this post, the best way to find out is to just ask me.
I was fortunate enough to be able to give a lightning talk on the history of Terraform provider development, a subject I find endlessly fascinating, with my coworker Katy Moe at HashiConf Digital 2020. It was an interesting experience doing a lightning talk with someone on a different continent over a Zoom call, but Katy was an amazing co-presenter and I’m really pleased with how it turned out.
We discussed the major inflection points in the history of the six year old framework that powers Terraform provider development, and drew attention to how new some features were and how many abstractions predated the features they now surface to the user.
A recording of the session is embedded below.