On Make, CloudFormation, and GitHub Actions.

Lobsters is a community-driven platform for sharing and discussing links to articles, tutorials, and projects related to technology and programming. Readers can learn about a wide range of topics, from software development and system administration to cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. With user submissions, comments, and voting, Lobsters provides a platform for collaborative learning and knowledge sharing among technology enthusiasts.

Lobsters

Build systems and infrastructure tools like Make, CloudFormation, and GitHub Actions force developers to write static configuration files that lack abstraction capabilities. When these declarative formats become too limited, developers resort to generating them with real programming languages. Tools like doit and AWS CDK demonstrate a better approach: using actual code to define build graphs and infrastructure, gaining type safety, modularity, and control flow for free. The industry should embrace code-first approaches rather than building DSLs in data formats that inevitably require code generation anyway.

Some Data Should Be Code