This week we are finally starting to get our development environment set up and working.  This hasn’t been as straightforward as creating a new project might be because we are dealing with something that already exists on the OSU servers.  The last week or so we have had to go through the process of getting the source code for the project, getting a development server created with OSU Engineering Support, and trying to figure out permissions.  It’s finally coming together though, but looking through the GitHub repo for this project, it looks like there is a new (well new to me) technology I will need to learn in order to start development, and that new technology is Docker.

I have not had the pleasure of working with Docker before, so to learn more about it and to get myself prepared to use it I did some reading online and watched some videos, and I have to say I am intrigued.  Docker looks like the perfect solution to allow software development locally that can easily be deployed elsewhere without unpredicted problems.  It does this by creating isolated containers that are self sufficient, meaning it is super portable. I can see why this is so useful and am excited to use it on this project.

I’m still in the process of setting it up and still have more to learn, but I think this will be a fun tool to work with, and I’m just excited to be getting experience with new tools and practices and expand my knowledge on this project journey.