When setting up a development environment, eventually you’ll have to deal with migrating the services to another machine. Docker allows you to migrate docker images between servers, so you can take advantage of different VPS providers, more resources like memory, disk space, faster CPU or SSD drives.
The talk around the water cooler at startups is always around how much runway the startup has, and if the engineering talent will need to be searching for a new job any time soon. But running a startup is about more than money. And the problem gets harder if the people running it are funding it from other, more stable income, and their basic investment is time.
A project I’m working on currently requires me to build a server side agent daemon. Due to the nature of the agent, a live connection requires to be open to the managing node server, using websockets. PHP is not very well suited to this kind of workload, so the obvious choice was to develop it using NodeJS. I will build a Docker image containing the application, as well as provide a standalone binary for people who don’t have Docker, but also don’t want the hassle of installing NodeJS.
Setting up a testing environment can be a rewarding pursuit - if you do your testing before you deploy code, your tests can signal errors and stop you from deploying a critical mistake to production. Testing requires various software, depending on your development process. One of the most common php testing frameworks is phpunit. Let’s see how we can set up a Docker driven test environment.
Docker is a popular way of packaging your applications, or micro services into container images, which can be copied to any running docker server. Docker uses a linux kernel feature - namespacing - which allows it to run applications in isolation away from the operating system, much like virtual machines, avoiding common pitfalls of virtualization like CPU and RAM allocation. Each docker container is much like any standalone application, except for the fact that it’s isolated away from the host OS.
It is my opinion that CSS resets are broken. My educated, argumented, and I’m sure, valid opinion. You might share it, you might agree, or you might not agree - at the end of the day, it just depends on what your use case is. Let me tell you why CSS resets today are broken and why we need a new deal.
