The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

You’re just a devcontainer.json away (Interview)

Mar 1, 2023

Brigit Murtaugh, a Product Manager on the Visual Studio Code team at Microsoft and co-author of the Dev Containers spec, dives into the innovative world of development containers. She discusses how devcontainer.json simplifies coding workflows, making collaboration easier for developers. Brigit explains the evolution of Visual Studio Code towards a more integrated development environment, emphasizing secure authentication and community feedback. Listeners will gain insights into unlocking the potential of dev containers and mastering practical implementation.

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ANECDOTE

Drive-by contribution

Jerod Santo recounts Changelog.com's cumbersome manual contribution process, limited to macOS.
Chris Eggert's "drive-by" devcontainer.json contribution enabled easy code spaces access, sparking the podcast's dev container exploration.

ANECDOTE

Reaching out to Brigit

The hosts contacted Brigit Murtaugh through various channels, including LinkedIn, GitHub, and email.
Brett Cannon also recommended having her on the show to discuss dev containers.

INSIGHT

Dev vs. Prod Containers

Dev containers and production containers differ significantly, especially regarding their needs.
Dev containers often require more resources and tools, leading to different configurations than production environments.

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This week we’re joined by Brigit Murtaugh, Product Manager on the Visual Studio Code team at Microsoft, and we’re talking about Development Containers and the Dev Container spec. Ever since we talked with Cory Wilkerson about Coding in the cloud with Codespaces we’ve wanted to get the Changelog.com codebase setup with a dev environment in the cloud to more easily support contributions. After getting a drive-by contribution from Chris Eggert to add a Dev Container spec to our codebase, we got curious and reached out to Brigit and asked her to come on the show to give us all the details.

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Featuring:

Brigit Murtaugh – GitHub, LinkedIn
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!