In 2019 we still struggle with our local build and testing environments. Every developer will be familiar with problems like:

• trying to set up a new project, only to discover that the requirements listed in the readme are out of date, incomplete or no longer available
• trying to set up a new project, only to discover that there are no requirements listed in the readme
• “works on my machine” issues like inconsistencies introduced by slightly different configurations across your machine, your colleagues’ machines and CI
• flaky integration and journey test runs against external dependencies like databases caused by environmental issues
• each project having its own esoteric shell script or makefile used to drive development tasks

There is a better way! Imagine being able to run your builds and tests quickly, consistently and completely automatically everywhere - on your machine, your colleagues’ machines and on CI - and to onboard new team members in just a few minutes, thanks to the power of Docker. And all this without fiddling around with Docker Compose files or shell scripts.

Come and learn about the technique and see a demo of a tool (recently rated ‘trial’ on the ThoughtWorks Tech Radar) that makes implementing this idea much easier.

I’m a developer and lead consultant at ThoughtWorks. I spend my time helping our clients solve gnarly technical problems. My particular interests include hardware, DevOps and improving the developer