Development Environments from Docker Images

Timothy Stephan

 on September 16th, 2020

I started my programming life on an IBM PCjr, writing programs in BASIC to keep track of my baseball card trading empire. Back then, setting up my “dev environment” was pretty - um - basic. It essentially meant inserting a floppy disk and waiting 20 minutes.

But of course, as software has advanced and become more complex, so have the development environments. Now, the process of deploying and maintaining one’s development environment to ensure that all tools are properly configured to work 1) together, and then 2) with everyone else on the project, can be a frustrating time sink.

The complexity is then compounded as everyone constantly has to make sure that their environment stays in alignment with everyone else’s -- or configuration drift can quickly lead to compilation errors, which quickly lead to time-consuming rework and many variations of the phrase, “Not sure what to tell you, it worked on my machine.”

Thankfully Coder Enterprise has a straightforward and effective way to solve this problem and enable automated setup of development environments and instant onboarding for developers, while also eliminating configuration drift.

Watch as Coder Developer Advocate Ben Potter demonstrates how environments are created from pre-configured Docker images using Coder Enterprise. It’s a simple "push button, write code" situation, removing hours of manual, time-consuming, and error-prone processes usually required to get environments set up correctly — and eliminating all the rework and debugging that is required when they aren't.

The impact: At Coder we had an engineer check in 400 lines of code on his first day. Boom.

Coder is free to try for 60 days! For more information, you can also contact us.