If you are new to tech something crucial to realize as early as possible is that its business is a cycle.

Something that looks new, very often is just something old enough that you didn’t know it was already out there, at some point famous, and now it is making its way back.

I developed with containers and with Docker for many years. It looked great, coming from Vagrant or from running everything locally with the need of managing ports collision, various conflicts and the inability to get a reproducible environment.

But in reality for the last two/three years I am back developing with everything running locally, without VMs, containers and so on.

How do I do it? I spoke about NixOS in this blog various time and this is the solution I onboarded to myself, but I do not want to confuse you that much here, there are many more solutions, and they depend on how much you feel comfortable with them.

Because ergonomics is what you should look for. You need to be confident that you can trust your troubleshooting techniques, or that you can hook tools you want to use without having to get lost on intermediate layers.

Based on your knowledge, passion and way of developing it may be Docker, NixOS, Proxmox but at the end of the story it is important to get quickly to what matters, the code you are trying to write or figure out.

Where you are in your career and what you are looking for is another factor to take under consideration, a few years ago be on top of the hype for me was a reasonable way, the only one that gave me confidence to stay ahead of my competitors or colleagues. To be relevant in some way.

For me, it worked out great, I don’t have the same lack of confidence anymore, and I have a network that I hope knows me well enough to help me get a decent job! Back then I was contributing and playing with a lot of projects, this is why I needed stronger isolation, and the ability to manage a lot of different dependencies. I don’t think I have the same needs today.

Today I want to be effective, for me to get there I need to trust the few tools I want in my tool chain.

The two categories I described in this article: the developer always looking for new things and the old grumpy but effective programmer survive and fight against me and I think many of you constantly.

They are as well a cycle just like the tech industry, and they are the two entities keeping us enthusiastic about our coding. How do you transition from one to the other? Personally time is the trigger.