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My Dad Said: Start With Compute. Now I See Why.

Aryan Choudhary on March 07, 2026

When I told my dad I had started learning Azure, he asked me one question. “Where did you start?” I mentioned tutorials, some documentation, and ...
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Web Developer Hyper

You’re lucky to have a great senior developer mentor who understands you well, your father, nearby. Good luck on your cloud journey! ☁️☁️☁️

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Aryan Choudhary

Thanks WDH!! Truly, I am grateful to have him as my father!

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Anna Villarreal

Honestly, after building a server in real life, I had a leg up when trying to create one in the cloud! I am still learning, but knowing how to configure one in real life gives you the ABCs of cloud as well!

In my short experience, an actual server is hardware service. Then you have platform as a service, then you have software as a service. It depends how much control you want and what it is you are after.

If you wanna try something interesting, try setting up a cloud server and self hosting n8n to yourself locally. Its a learning experience for sure! 💕🦄✨️

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Aryan Choudhary

Oh wow! That's great Anna! It sounds like a great experiment, I'll definitely give it a try!

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Anna Villarreal

Ooooo! Let me know how it goes when you get to it! Im excited for you. ✨️

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Julien Avezou

It's easy to just see the cloud as a bunch of abstractions but understanding the actual inner workings definitely helps build better intuitions for computing and programming. Thanks for the reminder and sharing this post!

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Aryan Choudhary

Thank you for the supportive comment Julien! Really appreciate it!

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Harsh

The most profound advice is often the simplest. Start with compute three words that can save months of confusion. Thanks for sharing this!

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Aryan Choudhary

Exactly Harsh, certainty and speed together are a deadly combo!!

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Raghavendra Kedlaya

I would slightly reword - Understand Windows on your Laptop.
Start with your laptop. If you are using Windows, understand everything runs on windows, and with a WSL - explore Ubuntu. Then you can easily work on cloud.
Windows - command-lines, processes, find, search, kill, schedule, firewal, allow ports, device managers, upgardes, network configuration, dhcp, static ip. wireless, blue-tooth. Video recording using OBS, video editing. setting up database, a web server.
html/css/javascripts do need server to run and so on. Bunch of shotcuts on windows. And all about VSCode.
With Ubuntu - you can try all of basic linux commands, shell scripts, cron jobs, install packages etc.

I see this a huge gap, when I do coaching with Engineering graduates. These are must, earlier the better for everyones career in IT. Good Luck.

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Aryan Choudhary

That is definitely true, and often missed link of the long chain in IT. Covering basics is important before moving to complex topics... Thanks for pointing this out Raghavendra!

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soy

Your dad's advice is spot on. Understanding what's actually running your code changes how you think about everything.
I took this to the extreme — I run 13 projects including LLM inference on a single RTX 5090 at home, served through Cloudflare Tunnel. No cloud VMs, no monthly bills scaling with traffic. The tradeoff is you become your own sysadmin, but for solo projects the cost savings are massive.
That said, knowing Azure compute fundamentals is valuable even if you go self-hosted — it gives you the vocabulary to understand what you're replacing and when cloud actually makes more sense.

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Aryan Choudhary

Damnnn, that IS extreme!!!
And yes definitely, knowledge is never wasted!

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Ashish Prajapati

Wow, such great post for understanding about compute

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Aryan Choudhary

Thank you Ashish!