Dev Container CLI Escaping the IDE Restrictions

Dev Container CLI: Escaping the IDE Restrictions

Jake Everhart Development Technologies, Docker, Programming Leave a Comment

In past blogs, I have discussed development containers (dev containers) in detail, from explaining their general mechanics to showing how they can bolster a team’s build automation. As a brief recap for the uninitiated: dev containers are a way of encapsulating a developer’s setup into a container, typically a Docker container. As a practical example, rather than forcing a new teammate to manually install and configure all the necessary tooling before contributing to a project, they can leverage a team’s devcontainer.json definition file to quickly spin up a fully configured development environment.

Microsoft has championed this workflow over the past few years, offering tight integration with tools like VS Code and Codespaces to make containerized development as seamless as possible. At the time of writing, the developer experience has reached a point where I honestly prefer to operate within a dev container for certain types of projects. When I open a team’s codebase within VS Code and it informs me that they have provided a dev container to use, I have higher confidence that I’ll be using the same versions of their tools and seeing the behaviors that they expect.

I’ve even come to trust these setups more than an equivalent set of Dockerfiles or docker-compose scripts, just because the simplicity of the ecosystem makes it more likely that everything is well-maintained and configured correctly. It’s easy to see how these standardization and automation benefits can be a huge boost to teams…once they’ve adopted the right tools to integrate with them.

But what if you don’t want to use VS Code?

Temporal .NET SDK and Workflows for Enterprise Apps

Temporal.IO and Workflows in Enterprise Applications

Zach Gardner .NET, Architecture, Development Technologies, Microservices Leave a Comment

In every software application I’ve ever worked on, no matter the industry or maturity of the team or number of weeks in a sprint, there have been three questions that always come up: What is the best way to center a

?

? Should we use tabs or spaces? How should we implement complex workflows?

It was with that third question in mind that I stumbled upon a link in HackerNews a few weeks back on Temporal.io announcing that its .NET SDK is now in alpha.

If you aren’t in the know, Temporal is a library that lets you describe workflows as code. It’s available in multiple languages, but the Python flavor is the most popular.

So, I took a leap of faith, tried out the Temporal .NET SDK, and decided to recap my thoughts for you all as a blog. I’ll walk through, at a high level, what the Temporal approach is, the implications of workflows at the different zones of enterprise architecture, and where I see Temporal being useful in a large organization’s software strategy.

A Lesson On Managing Expectations and Meeting Deadlines

The Mythical Person Month: A Lesson On Managing Expectations & Meeting Deadlines

Justin Hancock Architecture, Consulting, Soft Skills 3 Comments

One of my favorite things about the life journey that I find myself on is that I’m always learning. Every. Single. Day.

Some days I learn something new… most days I learn something new, actually. But then there are the days when I am reminded of something I learned years ago but have somehow forgotten for a time.

The Mythical Person Month is one such topic. It is a distinct and important lesson that I have learned many times now it seems.

Microservices Architecture

Microservices Architecture: The Good, the Bad, and Testing

Geoffrey Blogref Architecture Leave a Comment

It’s important to thoroughly consider both the benefits and drawbacks of microservices architecture before you implement it. It’s also important to implement robust testing strategies to ensure the reliability and quality of the overall system.

Over the course of this blog, I’ll explore the good, the bad, and the testing side of microservices. My hope is that this will give you a starting point as you consider whether microservices architecture is right for your project.

Notes From My Swarm to Kubernetes Migration

Luke Patterson Architecture, Development Technologies, Kubernetes Leave a Comment

In this post, I’ll discuss how I’m currently working to migrate a suite of apps from Docker Swarm to Kubernetes. The client chose this migration to align with more contemporary standards of container deployment and gain a more comprehensive feature set. Also, some products that they recently purchased were best supported as a Kube package. So you have a fuller …