Starting Over With Purpose — My Serverless Adventure

What it took starting at nothing to getting two completely serverless apps live

Illustration vector created by storyset

Serverless has been quite an adventure for me. It started in early 2019 when I was tasked to “go figure out this whole cloud thing.”

As I mentioned in my last post, my team and I had our work cut out for us. In addition to learning about serverless, we also had to learn about multi-tenancy, NoSQL data modeling, CI/CD. Pretty much every buzzword related to the cloud was on our radar.

We spent about a year learning and building proof of concepts until we finally began building “production-ready” software. The first day we started building for real. The team showed up to work all gung ho and ready to code. It took until around noon before we regrouped, and we all mutually felt like we weren’t ready.

There was so much to consider that proof of concepts hadn’t prepared us for. But we were an R and D team. We were pioneering this space for our company. We didn’t have a team of experts to turn to when we had questions.

So, we just….did it.

We went with what we knew, or thought we knew at the time, and tried to solve the business problem. We’d learn as we go and promise to return and improve our solutions as we learned.

You’ll never know less than what you know right now.

I couldn’t be more proud of my team. While many engineering teams might be left dead in uncertain tracks, mine charged right ahead. We built not one but two serverless apps and got them live in production in record time.

Of course, we made some mistakes along the way, but we all know there is no such thing as perfect software. Especially when you’re learning.

I can confidently say we accomplished what we did because we followed the do it, do it right, do it better mindset.

The “Do It” Phase

The initial development phase of any project is often considered an upgraded proof of concept. This means you need to do what you need to get it out the door, but you also need to follow security guidelines and any best practices you…