Some folks on the internet were interested in how I had managed to ditch Docker for local development. This is a slightly overdue write up on how I typically do things now with Nix, Overmind and Just.
Kind of cool if your production infrastructure can match. But for most companies (ie, Fortune 500 and some medium companies) implementing this would need a force majeure.
Decades of software rot, change in management, change in architecture, waxing and waning of software and hardware trends, half assed implementations, and good ole bottom tier software consultation/contractors brought into the mix make such things impossible to implement at scale.
Once worked at a company where their onprem infra was a mix of mainframe, ibm / dell proprietary crap, Oracle vendor locked, and some rhel/centos servers. Of course some servers were on different versions of the OS. So it was impossible to setup a development environment to replicate issues.
For the most part, that’s why I still use docker for most jobs. Much easier to pull in the right image, configure app deployment declaratively, and reproduce the bug(s). I would say 90% of the time it was reproducible. Before docker/containerization it was much less than that and we had to reproduce in some non production environment that was shared amongst team.
