No matter how you like to participate in developer communities, Pulumi wants to meet you there. If you want to meet other Pulumi users to share use-cases and best practices, contribute code or documentation, see us at an event, or just tell a story about something cool you did with Pulumi, you are part of our community.

Pulumi Community

I ‘refresh’ my stacks before each ‘up’ operation. Am I helping Pulumi run with a more-up-to-date state? Or am I simply being redundant and wasting time?

if you have anyone who might change the resources out of band from Pulumi, it's helpful. If not, it might just be taking longer