Experimenting with Development containers

Published on , 454 words, 2 minutes to read

Development containers are cool and I want to see if they work out in practice.

A few years ago I was introduced to the idea of Development containers by a former coworker. I was deep into the Nix koolaid at the time, so I thought they were kinda superfluous and ultimately not worth looking into. After having run a fairly popular open source project for a while, I've come to realize that setting up a development environment for it is actually a fair bit harder than it seems. I want to make it easy to contribute to the project, and one of the best ways I can do that is by lowering the skill floor for contribution.

As such, I'm starting to experiment with development containers across my projects. I wrote this article from inside a development container on my Macbook. If you want to play around with my development environment Techaro's package builder yeet, you can clone its repo from GitHub and activate the development container. You will get a known working configuration that you can use to build new and exciting things.

Notably, these development containers also allow you to use GitHub Codespaces to contribute. This means you don't even need to have a machine that's able to run Linux containers. You can contribute from any machine that can run GitHub Codespaces.

This is still an experiment, and here are the criteria I'm using to determine if this will be a success or not:

  1. Can people that don't really understand much about the stack behind projects clone a repo and get the software to build or run?
  2. Does this help lower the skill floor to make it easier to contribute to those projects?
  3. Will this finally get Anubis' integration tests to run consistently across OSes?

The main reason I was inspired to try this out was after I heard a YouTuber describe what AI assisted code editing felt like for new developers: it feels like being a senior developer where you just have things flow out of your hands and you're able to make new and exciting things. I think the Techaro way of giving people that kind of experience to someone would be letting you get the development environment of a senior developer, akin to what it feels like to use an expert mechanic's garage to fix your car. When you clone the repos I'm testing with, you get a version of the configuration that I use, modulo the parts that don't make the most sense for running inside containers.

I'm super excited to see how this turns out. Maybe it'll be a good thing, maybe it won't. Only one way to know for sure!

Facts and circumstances may have changed since publication. Please contact me before jumping to conclusions if something seems wrong or unclear.

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