I worked with someone who attempted to containerize the entire dev experience, including vscode setup and extension configuration. They were trying to minimize the amount of time we spent figuring out why a project would build on one machine but not the other.

This didn’t make sense for a number of reasons:

- We were both using Apple M1 machines

- There was only one line of communication - between two developers

- The containerized environment had absolutely zero of the tools I was used to in my personal environment. Even the aliases in my zsh profile were gone. I wrote a script to copy my local zsh into the environment each time it was spun up. And made sure not to commit that file to version control.

Note that this was separate from building and deploying with Docker, which we still did. This was more akin to remoting into your own dev machine whose settings you cannot modify easily.

Overall, I feel like containerizing the dev environment raises the floor for developers, but vastly lowers the ceiling.

Okay, thanks. I suppose a good takeaway is to allow for freedom of integrating custom changes and not be too opinionated of tool or method choice.

Well it depends I guess, i dont know who your tool is designed for. Some developers want/need their hand held through things like shell configuration and choice of IDE, while others really despise when someone makes a subpar decision for them