Devcontainers: Reproducible Development Environments in VS Code

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 11:00:00 +0000

I have lost enough hours to “but it works on my machine” that I treat the phrase as a personal insult. Someone clones a repo, the Node version is wrong, a native dependency won’t compile because they’re missing a system library, and an afternoon evaporates into apt-get archaeology. Devcontainers fix this by moving the whole development environment into a container described by a file that lives in the repo. Clone, reopen, build, work. That’s the promise, and after a couple of years of leaning on them I’ll say it mostly delivers — with some sharp edges I’ll be honest about.

Nix: Reproducible Development Environments (Once You Survive the Learning Curve)

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Every developer has lived the same small tragedy. A new colleague clones the repo, follows the README, and nothing works. The wrong version of Node. A missing system library. A make that needs a tool nobody documented because it has been on the lead’s laptop since 2019. Hours vanish. Nix exists to make this entire category of misery go away, and it does, eventually, after putting you through a learning curve that I will not pretend is gentle.

Reproducibility - Tag - vo.rs

Devcontainers: Reproducible Development Environments in VS Code

Nix: Reproducible Development Environments (Once You Survive the Learning Curve)