The Tool I Was Terrified Of (And How I Finally Stopped Avoiding It)
I spent months scared of GitLab Terraform. Here's exactly what broke the fear—and why it wasn't about studying harder.
I was genuinely scared of GitLab Terraform for months. Not mildly uncomfortable. Actually scared. And I avoided it as much as I could.
The fear started when my team migrated from Bitbucket + Jenkins (where deployments were a simple dropdown menu) to GitLab Terraform (where every code push triggered a pipeline that almost always failed). Each failure reinforced the panic. I never built the muscle memory because I was too busy running the other direction.
The shift wasn't a breakthrough moment
What actually changed was switching to a team where I had no choice but to engage with it. But even then—no single epiphany. Just gradual exposure plus specific help.
I asked ChatGPT to explain CI/CD concepts in GitLab-specific terms. Not generic definitions. Not documentation copy-paste. Questions like "What does CI mean in this context, with this tool?" That reframing stuck better than anything else.
I started mapping the repos themselves. Looking at the actual YAML files. Understanding the stages, environments, templates. Not reading about them. Staring at real examples in projects I was using.
Then I worked with a teammate on a real feature—implementing a resiliency automation pattern across multiple projects. Not a tutorial. Not a sandbox. Actual work. We walked through multiple repos, multiple template variations, actual deployed examples. I followed each step myself on my own time afterward, trying to recreate what I'd seen.
That repetition—touching the thing with my hands—made it stick.
Where I still get stuck
I still can't trace how to connect CI to CD when the branch isn't in main. I can't provision pipelines end-to-end from scratch. And honestly? That's fine. I'm not a GitLab expert. I'm just no longer terrified.
The fear was never really about GitLab or Terraform. It was about not putting in repetition. Not practicing. Not breaking things in a controlled way.
What actually works
Confidence isn't something you study into existence. It's familiarity plus repetition. You get it by:
- Using the tool on real work, not tutorials
- Breaking things and fixing them yourself, not reading how others did it
- Asking AI to explain concepts specific to your tool and context, not general definitions
- Working alongside someone who knows it, then doing it again solo
- Accepting that being "more comfortable" beats being expert-level
The tool you've been avoiding? It's the exact one you should sit with. Not because it's the hardest—because avoidance makes it stay hard forever.
More repetition. More familiarity. That's the whole system.