Starting a new project always comes with a mix of excitement and hesitation. Will the code run? Will the environment cooperate? And most importantly: how long will it take until everything is up and running?
That’s exactly how I found myself facing a new repository, surrounded by an equally new team. Before I even wrote a single line of code, I was given a warning:
— It took me a week to get this project running on my machine. It works in production, though. I’ve never changed anything there.
Nothing like a little motivation before getting started, right? I took a deep breath and did what any rational person would do: I opened the README.md. Not much information. Okay, plan B: check language versions, dependencies, tools. Incompatible versions, conflicting packages, a festival of minor roadblocks. Three-quarters of the day spent, and still, the application wouldn't run.
Then it hit me: with everything I had already changed and installed, how could I be sure I was on the right track? What if, instead of fighting the environment, I simply dockerized it?
That’s the real power of containers: predictability. I can break everything as many times as I want and always have a clean environment to start over. A few hours later, the application was running. Not perfectly, but it worked. A bit more effort, and I had something presentable, a first step toward building a solid and reliable environment.
Docker is a tool for standardization, automation, and easier deployments. But it’s also a great ally in experimentation and learning. It allows us to fail without fear, to test, to optimize. And at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter whether it took seven days or just a few hours—what matters is that now, the project runs.
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