Containers

There’s a few things that really strike me as significant improvements to life since I was commercially developing 20 years ago:

• Accessing information – the first time I bought the development stack to write commercial software against the Windows SDK it came in a huge carton with, I guess, fifteen or so 2″ thick books. That was how you looked things up in those days. Fast forward to an internet connected world of websites, stack exchange, Discord and ChatGPT. So much better.
• Open Source – is an actual useful thing that the entire connected world runs on – not just a weird hippy idea. It’s almost routine to open source your code now and everyone benefits from that.
• Containers – “getting things working” used to be a thing. Most times now I want to spin something up to play with it, it just works because all the dependencies are bundled with it, and it doesn’t mutate the environment in any way I don’t know about. There’s no friction to run a giant app, and no hangover for the OS when I nuke it.

I love this great explanation from Coderized about containers – I wish I’d seen it five months ago.