| I am totally on board with the idea of improving productivity. The issue I see is that this is avoiding a deeper problem - namely that the software stack requires a max-level wizard to set up from scratch each time. Refactoring your application so that it can be cloned and built and ran within 2-3 keypresses is something that should be strongly considered. For us, these are the steps required to stand up an entirely new stack from source: 0. Create new Windows Server VM, and install git + .NET Core SDK. 1. Clone our repository's main branch. 2. Run dotnet build to produce a Self-Contained Deployment 3. Run the application with --console argument or install as a service. This is literally all that is required. The application will create & migrate its internal SQLite databases automatically. There is no other software or 3rd party services which must be set up as a prerequisite. Development experience is the same, you just attach debugger via VS rather than start console or service. We also role play putting certain types of operational intelligence into our software. We ask questions like "Can our application understand its environment regarding XYZ and respond automatically?" |
I built a service that is installed in 10 lines that could be ran through a makefile, but I assume specific versions of each library of the system and don’t intend to test against the hundreds of possible system dependencies combinations or assume it will surely be compatible anyway.
The dev running the container won’t building their own debian installs with the specific version required in my doc just to run the install script from there, they just instanciate the container and run with it.