Development

Attend any tech-related event or read any tech-related article over the past 18 months, and you will likely have heard of Docker and have an inkling of what it is and does.

Note that this post has been updated as of October 20, 2016.

Many of us start our Docker journey pulling images from the Docker Hub with the time-honored docker pull command.

Note that Otto has been decommissioned as of August 19, 2016.

Recently out of private beta, Docker’s new native applications aim to replace the current methods for running Docker on Windows and Mac, creating a better experience for developers using those platforms.

The humble but powerful Dockerfile is the building block of Docker images and containers. In essence, it’s a list of commands the Docker engine runs to assemble the image, and thus instances of images as containers.

If you’re reading this blog, then you have a rough idea of what containers are and why you want to use them. Docker has made it easy to experiment with containers, and is slowly making it easier to deploy and manage them in production environments. However, there are a still a lot of gaps in what Docker offers (for free), and others have stepped up to fill them.

What’s one of the first things you look at when trying a new piece of software? Or after you’ve hit that tempting Download button, what’s your usual next step? I will take a bet that for at least 70 percent of you, it’s the documentation that you check out next.

In my last post, I covered how to improve the written component of your documentation with automated spell-checking and suggestions for better writing. In this post, I’ll cover the code component of good documentation; trying an example and finding it doesn’t work is a sure-fire way to annoy a reader.

Drawing my short series to a close (we’ve talked about testing code examples in documentation and automating spelling and grammar checks in documentation), let’s cover one of the hardest elements of documentation to create and keep up to publishDate: screenshots.

I’m sure we’ve all been there. That moment when you realize that important and sensitive access details have leaked online into a public space and potentially rendered your services to unrequited access. With the ever-growing amount of services we depend on for our development stack, the number of sensitive details to remember and track has also increased. To cope with this problem, tools have emerged in the field of “secrets management.” In this post, I am going to look at Docker Secrets, the n...

Released earlier in 2017, Docker’s new native applications for Windows and Mac replaced the older methods for running Docker on Windows and Mac and created a better experience for developers using those platforms.

Chat bots are everywhere. Suddenly our messaging services are inundated with small automated systems inhabiting spaces in the domain of human-to-human communication. We can now have conversations with bots that help us buy products, book travel, make meetings, solve customer service issues, and much more.

HashiCorp is a company that feels like it’s always been around. Quietly plugging away just out of the limelight working on awesome products and every now and then releasing something groundbreaking that you wondered how you worked without it. I attended a couple of meetups recently that covered HashiCorp tools and felt the time was ripe I dug into all they have to offer a CI workflow.

The Docker API has allowed for a plethora of options for interfacing with Docker, your containers, and images to emerge from CLIs to desktop applications and web-based management tools. I am a fan of graphical user interfaces and thought it was time to survey the current landscape of GUIs for interacting with Docker.

I will assume you are at least familiar with the concept of microservices — loosely coupled services that provide discrete solutions to business use cases that you can combine to solve current needs and demand. The architectural pattern has gained popularity over the past years, and although not everyone is completely sure what “doing it right” looks like, it’s a concept that suits modern needs and is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

Before we begin, note that this post isn’t intended as an introduction to GraphQL. For a beginner’s guide, I suggest Derek Haynes’ Codeship post or howtographql.com.

Back in my Docker hosting post, I noted that deploying and orchestrating containers live was still a missing step in the Docker workflow for many developers. A handful of complex orchestration tools entered to fill the void, with large cloud companies offering to host your setup for you. In that post, I intentionally avoided tools that sat in the middle of this process by helping you to deploy containers to cloud services, but there are plenty of them, including Docker’s own official cloud servi...

The world and its dog has gone crazy for blockchain (and related technologies, which is a whole other post). The past two years have been a hype roller coaster for the technology with stories of equally insane valuations, technical proposals, media exposure, regulatory nightmares, frauds, and unrealized dreams.