Chris Sainty

Update:

Much of this post is made irrelevant by the release of Docker for Mac beta. You no longer need a separate virtualization environment (virtualbox) you no longer need to tunnel ports (docker-pf) and you can now map volumes directly from OSX to docker and have watches etc all work.
So just brew cask install docker and ignore most of this post!

Docker is the talk of the town in recent times. Containerized deployments of micro services are quickly gaining momentum as best-practice architecture for certain classes of applications.

As ever in software development though, understanding how to make a start with these tools isn't easy. Especially if you are working on an existing monolith.

So in this post I will share some basic tips to start using Docker in your existing development workflow, gaining this understanding can be the stepping stone to using Docker in production or in your next project.

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For a while now this blog has been built with Jekyll which has generally been a very positive experience.
It has also felt very fragile though. Installed as a set of global gems just waiting to be clobbered by an update.

So it was that I broke the setup one day. Instead of trying to fix it, I decided to isolate the setup inside a vagrant VM. This allows me to port it between machines and reproduce it at will.

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In my last post about dotfiles I spoke of automating the setup and installation of a new mac.

There are two indepensible tools that deserve mentioning, Homebrew and Caskroom.

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I recently received a new Mac. Before setting it up though I wanted to investigate automation to help speed up the process and to re-use config between machines.

I am still somewhat of an OSX/nix beginner. I had heard of dotfiles and seen the GitHub page but it still wasn't really clear to me what these repositories contained and how they helped.

To help anyone in a similar position, here is what I have learned.

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Webpack has become my standard tooling for front-end assets in recent times. Though for all the in-depth documentation I found the learning curve steep and the number of options confusing. So I'd like to share some of what I learnt.

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