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by daxaxelrod 1523 days ago
Idk man, I agree with OP. Writing YAML configs is one of my least favorite things to do. Might be worth polling more people
2 comments

To counter this, it is so easy to write YAML I don't get the fuss. And this coming from someone who took a long time to learn Python.
Perhaps the issue is not the writing of the YAML, but the need to have a good understanding of all the resources/primatives in order to get things glued together. Many application developers just want to focus on their application, and not on all the nuances of subnets, security groups, autoscaling thresholds etc.
> Perhaps the issue is not the writing of the YAML, but the need to have a good understanding of all the resources/primatives in order to get things glued together.

This and the fear of making a mistake with the most important configuration file of the application.

OP this is a clear opporutinty for Stacktape.

I agree. A lot of people were asking about this. We will do our best to help.

First thing we want to do is an interactive CLI "tour" that auto-detects the project type, asks a few basic questions, and generates the YAML for you. Should be released in ~1-2 weeks.

Second thing we are thinking about is a visual GUI. Will be harder, but doable. We can integrate it into the local development studio.

I haven't looked at what your yaml is looking like, but I encourage you to consider having sensible defaults for most resource types (including their existence), and provide a way for Devs to go off the rails if they need to. Sensible defaults can get simpler use cases 95-100% of the way there, relieving the burden for app Devs to have good understanding of everything that is going on under the hood.
This is exactly what Stacktape does.

For example, the "HTTP API Gateway" resources has 0 required properties you need to configure.

We have sensible defaults for everything. We also try to automatically infer as many things as possible.