As someone paid to write code that interacts with D365… I see myself in this meme.

I would have loved to see Hemmer mentoring a young Montgomery Scott…

It’s false. Different memory addresses, etc.

I write back end JS, when I’m not writing back end C#.

It’s totally fine. In fact, Node makes it a great back end language. I find that the infamous quirks of JS fall into two categories - “common enough that you internalize the rules for them” and “edge cases that almost never come up in practice.”

And when you write back ends in JS… you aren’t on the endless new framework treadmill!

Yep, or go proofread some JSON…

I’m sorry, but today is Monday…

Yes! This what I usually do. I will develop on the host using tools installed via Homebrew, then package/build/test via docker.

And to be clear, I really love the ideas behind Bluefin and use it every day. I’ve just kind of given up on devcontainers, specifically.

Honestly, even with VSCode, devcontainers are kind of just ok, at best.

They are very fiddly. The containers keep running when you close VSCode (which makes sense, and sure the resource usage is minimal, but it’s damned annoying) and you have to stop them manually. Meanwhile the commands in VSCode to work with/activate the containers are not super clear in terms of what they actually do.

Oh, what’s that? Need a shell inside the container you’re working in for testing things out, installing dependencies, etc.? Well, I hope you pick the right one of VSCode’s crappy built in terminals! Because if you want to use a real terminal, you are stuck with the crappy devcontainer CLI to exec into the container. A CLI that is NOT up to date with, or even includes, all the commands for devcontainers in the editor (which is what makes working with them in other IDE/editors such a pain in the butt…).

And this gets me…. What? A container I can share with other developers, sure, but it’s very likely NOT the container we are actually going to deploy in. So…

Yeah, I’ve also had a lot of frustrations with devcontainers in Bluefin. I really like what the Bluefin project is doing. The reasoning behind it makes a lot of sense to me. But devcontainers are kind of pushed as the way you “should” be writing code on Bluefin and it’s…. not great.

They do have Homebrew and Distrobox though, which helps a lot. I have ended up doing most of my development work on Bluefin on the host system with tools installed via brew, which is kept separate enough from the rest of the file system to still keep things tidy.

Overall, I think Bluefin is great and it, or something like it, may very well be the future of Linux… but the future isn’t here just yet and there are some growing pains, for sure.

It’s… fine. Last job was an AWS shop, so I definitely had to learn the differences but all the commonly used stuff is in Azure too.

I can’t really make any legit complaints that don’t exist in AWS in a slightly different flavor.

I’m the “makes commits to Azure DevOps because that’s what his company uses” user, so mine looks a lot like number 4.

Ah, I see you too have run code in Azure Functions…

I the context of Linux and self-hosting “prepping” is usually more about maintaining services you find useful in a way that you can do it yourself, as opposed to relying on Google or Amazon (etc) who could pull the rug out from under you at basically any time.

Show me a Montgomery Scott or Miles O’Brien and we can talk…

The US government basically ONLY uses SQL…

I might be in the minority, but I get more excited about the idea of maintaining/working on some creaky old legacy code base than I do about the idea of starting a new project from scratch.

I love doing that…

Man, I hate it when that happens.

Right, it’s Sisko’s “It’s easy to be an angel in paradise…” from season 1. That’s the main theme of the whole show - how do the Federation’s ideals hold up in significantly less than ideal conditions? What does it mean to be “the good guys” when all of the choices in front of you are varying degrees of bad?

People always mention the later seasons, understandably so, but it carries through the entire series. In some ways, it’s even more prominent in the early seasons when DS9 is portrayed as being pretty remote, Federation back up is far away, the main cast is own their own, and the Cardassian fleet is always nearby.

Hmmm, interesting. I like brew, for sure. And devcontainers worked ok for me when I was working on something by myself.

But as soon as I started working on a side project with a friend, who uses Ubuntu and was not trying to develop inside a container, things got more complicated and I decided to just use brew instead. I’m sure I could have figured it out, but we are both working full time and have families and are just doing this for fun. I didn’t want to hold us up!

Our little project’s back end runs in a docker compose with a Postgres instance. It’s no problem to run it like that for testing.

Maybe a re-read of the documentation for devcontainers would help…

Personally, I have found the developer experience on Bluefin-dx (the only one I’ve tried…) to be…. mixed.

VSCode + Devcontainers, which are the recommended path, are pretty fiddly. I have spent as much time trying to get them to behave themselves as I have actually writing code.

Personally, I’ve resorted to using Homebrew to install dev tools. The CLI tools it installs are sandboxed to the user’s home directory and they have everything.

It’s not containers - I deploy stuff in containers all the time. But, at least right now, the tooling to actually develop inside containers is kind of awkward. Or at least that’s been my experience so far.

I think the ublue project is fantastic and I really like what they are doing. But most of the world of developer tooling just isn’t there yet. Everything you can think of has instructions on how to get it going in Ubuntu in a traditional installation. We just aren’t there yet with things like Devcontainers.