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Maybe this is heresy, but I really have never understood the move to Docker in the context of development environment. You wanna use containers in production en

Maybe this is heresy, but I really have never understood the move to Docker in the context of development environment. You wanna use containers in production environments, great, go for it. I suppose someone will say that then necessitates Docker in dev because we want dev to mirror production in some form - but that's seldom a reality. Some talk too about how Docker made it easy to bring up new development environments / onboard new developers, but in practice I've never seen this as a "Docker" thing - there were plenty of other ways to accomplish this goal, and Docker in some of my experience just added yet another tool. As for why I continue to use a Mac for development - it works, my fingers are mapped to the keyboard commands, and it's the best combo of hardware+software that I've found so far.

Szpadel 4y ago
if you are preparing your own env, then I agree, but if you want whole team/company to share the same env then it's useful tool even with all complications it introduces. its even more useful when your dev env need to be updated fairly often.
- poulsbohemian 4y ago
  Yeah, I get that’s the idea… I’ve just never seen it work, and any context for me has turned into a “what is docker actually doing for me in this context?” When I worked with specialized hardware / OS dependent things, we needed to bring up full VMs with our config. When I worked in shops with lots of microservices, it was better to actually run against the current integration environment rather than try to bring them all up locally. For so many apps, package management is the important part in terms of consistency from one machine to the next. So - I get what other people tell me about docker, I’ve just never been able to make sense of it as useful in my dev environments and teams. In fact, the one team I saw that really committed to it hard, it was a cluster (and maybe that’s why I have a trauma response toward it).
  - nikau 4y ago
    Its just a rehash what devs did in the 90s, ie. have a zip or tar file of an installation directory of dev tools and utilities. We used to do it back then with everything statically linked or libs put into a folder with a LD_PRELOAD variant for whichever unix os they were on. And it makes sense - if you have ever had to support a large team of developers you find out that a lot of them are totally siloed into their development niche and most have no idea around how to debug a bash script or troubleshoot issues when they encounter a simple deviation from the onboarding instructions. Then you have fun things like there being 2 conflicting versions of yq out in the wild and conflicting utilities if someone has installed GNU tools in preference of the mac versions and a docker image makes a lot of sense.

Szpadel 4y ago

if you are preparing your own env, then I agree, but if you want whole team/company to share the same env then it's useful tool even with all complications it introduces. its even more useful when your dev env need to be updated fairly often.

poulsbohemian 4y ago
Yeah, I get that’s the idea… I’ve just never seen it work, and any context for me has turned into a “what is docker actually doing for me in this context?” When I worked with specialized hardware / OS dependent things, we needed to bring up full VMs with our config. When I worked in shops with lots of microservices, it was better to actually run against the current integration environment rather than try to bring them all up locally. For so many apps, package management is the important part in terms of consistency from one machine to the next. So - I get what other people tell me about docker, I’ve just never been able to make sense of it as useful in my dev environments and teams. In fact, the one team I saw that really committed to it hard, it was a cluster (and maybe that’s why I have a trauma response toward it).
- nikau 4y ago
  Its just a rehash what devs did in the 90s, ie. have a zip or tar file of an installation directory of dev tools and utilities. We used to do it back then with everything statically linked or libs put into a folder with a LD_PRELOAD variant for whichever unix os they were on. And it makes sense - if you have ever had to support a large team of developers you find out that a lot of them are totally siloed into their development niche and most have no idea around how to debug a bash script or troubleshoot issues when they encounter a simple deviation from the onboarding instructions. Then you have fun things like there being 2 conflicting versions of yq out in the wild and conflicting utilities if someone has installed GNU tools in preference of the mac versions and a docker image makes a lot of sense.