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• Balancing ease of use with complexity, including feedback on template simplicity |
• Documentation and user feedback for optimizing CLI and feature flows |
• Newer template versions referencing pre-baked images vs. Docker files |
• User experience and training needs for different audiences |
• Key concepts of containers and the open spec |
• Using Dev Containers with VS Code and Codespaces |
• Getting started with Dev Containers: adding a dev container and building within it |
• Available resources for learning more about Dev Containers |
• Using Dev Containers with various tools and editors |
**Jerod Santo:** So we are joined by Brigit Murtaugh, a product manager on the Visual Studio Code team at Microsoft, and one of the co-authors or the people working on the Dev Containers spec. Brigit, welcome to the show. |
**Brigit Murtaugh:** Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here. |
**Jerod Santo:** We are excited to have you. We're just learning about Dev Containers by way of a contributor to our changelog.com repo, who wanted to hack on the repo... And if you go to our repo at github.com/thechangelogchangelog.com and you try to hack on it, there's a contributing doc, and it's "Here's how you get... |
**Brigit Murtaugh:** I'm glad the trail led to me and we can talk today. |
**Jerod Santo:** So are we. It was awesome. I'm glad that you agreed to join us. I think we hit you up six ways from Sunday - LinkedIn, GitHub, email, and then by way of our co-friend, Brett Cannon, who also put in a good word, and we're "We're getting Brigit on the show, one way or the other." I mean, you can't say no... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, you can say no, it just wouldn't be polite. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. You could just block us from everything and say "These guys are creepy." But thankfully you didn't, and... Yeah, we'd love to learn more about containers.dev, what it is and what y'all are up to. Do you want to open up with us and just tell us what containers.dev is? |
**Brigit Murtaugh:** Yeah, that sounds good. So anyone listening, you can go to containers.dev in your browser, and you're gonna see our overview spec site for the Dev Containers specification. And like Jerod was describing, dev containers - if you haven't heard of them before - are this really awesome tool to help you... |
And essentially, there's a couple of files that configure your dev container, and so that's what was added to the Changelog's repo. So there's a devcontainer.json, which just describes the metadata about what should go into your container, and then you can also link out to a Docker file, which you may have heard of or ... |
And with devcontainer.json you can really extend it with what you want, specifically for a development environment. |
\[05:57\] And so with containers in general, if you've heard of them or use them in other applications, you may think, "Okay, cool. That's a way to standardize what my app has when it's deployed, or when it's off running in production." But there's a lot of other opportunities to standardize what your app is doing, or ... |
**Jerod Santo:** I love it conceptually. I know that when Docker first became a thing and people started using it, I thought of Docker as a thing to put production stuff in. And then I thought, "Well, I'll just put my development stuff in there, and then when I'm ready, I'll do like docker go prod mode", or something, ... |
**Brigit Murtaugh:** Yeah, exactly. So you could think of - if I'm opening up my favorite editor, IDE, and what am I typically using to work on my project. yeah, if it's a Python app, I'm going to need Python installed, and I'm going to need that whether I'm in the process of creating my project, or if it's deployed...... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That is kind of beautiful, that that can work like that. I mean, it's been a while since Docker. I mean, Docker has been around, it's gotten better, this has been more mature... And I kind of feel like the resistance is somewhat futile for this cloud world to take over our dev environments. We talke... |
**Jerod Santo:** Round up... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Decade... Right? |
**Jerod Santo:** We're at decade now... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[10:00\] It started as a contribution to get into the cloud, and I think this is kind of cool... But do you feel like - maybe Jerod this is more towards you... Do you feel like this is futile, this resistance towards like cloud dev environments running this thing like that? do you think resistance ... |
**Jerod Santo:** I feel like you are attacking me personally at this point, because I am resistant... Well, as Brigit will probably point out, |
Codespaces is very much in the cloud, insofar as you're literally running it in a browser tab, right? And that's one thing. But what this dev container thing provides is not just - it's cloud-based coding, but you're still local with your VS Code, for instance. And of course, as we talk about the spec and what your tea... |
I do think it's probably futile, because there's so much upside to the containerization, to the repeatability, to the sort of like your dev infrastructure as code, like having it all right there... And then just teamwork. Teamwork tends to be what makes the dream work. I don't know; what do you think, Brigit? Is it fut... |
**Brigit Murtaugh:** I was gonna say the same thing; maybe that's too cheesy, but you said it first, so... \[laughter\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Sorry... I never let a cheesy moment go by... |
**Brigit Murtaugh:** Yeah. I mean, I think as well as we're all these kinds of systems and tools and tooling get better... Like, we're seeing cloud-based environment not be something where it's like "Well, I'm probably going to lose all my work there. It's not going to run right." It's like, no, it probably is going to... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. I think for me the resistance has been against layers, like adding more and more layers... And for me, especially running on a Mac, Docker was always so slow. And I know there's been a lot of work put into that. I think it's gotten faster lately... I've just never liked the Docker dev experience,... |
I think that I will not be as resistant in the future, as I have been in the past... At least I hope not to be. You know, I'm getting older, we do get set in our ways, and for a lot of us at a certain point progress just kind of goes on, and we just kind of stop at a certain place. Maybe I'll get there, I don't know. I... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. I was just thinking, this reminds me of like a smell. This is something that I think Steve Jobs kind of talked about back in the day... One of the more famous kind of interviews, or quotes, I'm not really sure how you'd describe it, but one thing he said was you have to work backwards from the... |
\[14:03\] And so this is a problem that, Brigit, you and your team I'm sure are probably very keen on and very sure of, because you have to work from "What's the user experience we desire?", back from the tech. Versus "Here's Dev Containers, and what it offers", and fit it into these non-round holes. That's really what... |
**Brigit Murtaugh:** Yeah, I think definitely starting with user feedback, the users and what we want their experience to be. What we really hope to do with anything Dev Container-related, or even just beyond, in general product, VS Code sense, and all that... So we first published the remote development extensions in ... |
So I think like getting that feedback is really what sculpted of "Hey, let's start investing in remote development", as that's something that people really need, and that's where the market and user needs are going. And then from there - yeah, as we design new things with Dev Containers, and trying to make it easier fo... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Is this VS Code users, just like Visual Studio Code? Is there a difference between like Visual Studio Code and VS Code? |
**Brigit Murtaugh:** Same thing. If you want to write out the whole name of Visual Studio Code, you totally can. VS Code is the same. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** When did it merge? Wasn't that like a paid version that wasn't open source? |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, there's Visual Studio... |
**Brigit Murtaugh:** Visual Studio is a separate IDE. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. Okay. Such a confusing thing for me. See, I'm still unclear to this moment right now. Clarity... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it's tough, because it broke off of Visual Studio, which was Microsoft's big IDE. It still exists today, right? Still progressing... But VS Code, Visual Studio Code was -- you remember the story of VS Code, Adam; we told it back in the day at Microsoft Build... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes. |
**Jerod Santo:** Brigit, perhaps -- we have you here, we have a VS Code representative with us... Maybe you can dispel this notion that I've floated into the ether before; as VS Code continues to get better, but also just get more stuff, more and more and more and more and more, it's like, is there a future where VS Co... |
**Brigit Murtaugh:** Yeah, I mean, I think at its core, we always call VS Code an editor rather than a full-fledged IDE, or an integrated development environment. And I think that it's kind of somewhere in between. So it's like maybe more than just like a super-simple editor without many additions; because you can have... |
\[18:08\] In 2021 we released VS Code for the web, or VScode.dev. So you can just go in your browser, type in VScode.dev, and you'll see a version of VS Code running just entirely there in the browser; you didn't have to download anything. So with that, and then as we have a growing set of remote experiences, and just ... |
**Jerod Santo:** I think that's wise. I think it'd be a shame if VS Code became so full of stuff that it was a full-on IDE by default. I mean, heck, you wouldn't really want to run that inside your web browser necessarily, because it takes so long to load up, or so much memory to run... So I've always liked that you ha... |
With regard to -- what did you say? You said "Code anything, anywhere..." Was that the slogan? |
**Brigit Murtaugh:** Yeah, we like to say "Yeah, you can work on, edit code, anything from anywhere." |
**Jerod Santo:** Anything from anywhere. I like that one. So you're kind of on the anywhere side, right? Like, your focus and your work is on the remote aspect, the anywhere aspect. How long have you been working on this spec in particular, Dev Containers? And when did you decide to take it beyond just a VS Code intern... |
**Brigit Murtaugh:** Yeah, so I've been on the VS Code team since 2020. And I first joined and focused on the remote extensions. We had three main remote extensions: WsL, SSH, and Dev Containers. And then over the next year as well we worked really closely with the GitHub Codespaces team, and they also support Dev Cont... |
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