Programming

My life changed once I discovered dev containers in VS Code. Basically developing within a bootstrapped Docker container.

I work primarily on the JVM & the projects (personal/corporate) I work w/ can be summarised as below:

1. Building & running the repo is done on the host using an SCM (software configuration management tool) such as Gradle or SBT.
2. The external dependencies of the repo, such as Redis, are managed via adocker-compose.yml.
3. The README contains a short series of commands to do different tasks RE (1)

However one approach that I've always been fond of (& apply/advocate wherever I can) is to replace (3) w/ a Makefile containing a bunch of standard targets shared across all repos, eg test, integration-test. Then Makefiles are thinly customised to fit the repo's particular repo.

This has proven to be very helpful wrt congnitive load (and also CI/CD pipelines): ALL projects, regardless of the toolchain, use the same set of commands, namely

• make test
• make integration-test
• make compose-up
• make run

In short (quoting myself here):

Don't repeat yourself. Make Make make things happen for you!

Orchestration and containerization are heavy dependencies. I prefer few and simple requirements, especially on the environment.

That only works well with tech with a defined or prevalent environment. Then it's a matter of keeping docs up to date - like any doc.

Using small scripts if necessary, and splitting off non central dev workflows helps keeping it simple and focused.