Docker Compose

I've been recently getting really into home automation- you know, making my house Smart™, which basically means half the time my lights don't turn on and the other half of the time apparently my kitchen faucet needs a static IP address.

But it's been a blast! It's a fun way to write code for yourself, outside of work, to have an impact in the real world. It's a nice way of falling in love with a different side of programming again.

I've used Apple's HomeKit for awhile, since we're pretty all-in in Apple devices at home, but the rough edges have been grating at me more and more. HomeKit is so opaque- you can't see what's wrong, why a device is unresponsive, and most importantly: the compatibility isn't there. HomeKit has a limited selection of — more expensive — accessories, and as you go beyond just simple LED lights, you want a bit more power. Also, we're programmers, dammit, gimme all the things.

Anyway, I've switched to Home Assistant the last few months, and I'm kicking myself I didn't make the switch earlier. As a programmer, it's great: you get the most capability than pretty much any other smart home platform (integrations have been written for most devices and technologies out there today), it's easier to debug, and when you want to go bigger than just simple lights on/off, HA has some really powerful stuff behind it.

I use Home Assistant in conjunction with Docker and Docker Compose; since the config is extracted out, upgrades are usually as easy as a pull of the latest version. I've just started digging into writing integrations for a lesser-used device that I have at home, and HA makes it pretty straightforward to just magically add it to the home network.

It plays well with others, too- we require a VPN connection in to the home network to access our Home Assistant install, and HA has a few tricks to help with that (ignoring the VPN route if you're on a local network, etc). Nice client support for iOS and Android, too.

Anyway, big fan of Home Assistant if you want to go beyond simple home automations and setup. Wish I would have done it a lot earlier. Also, big fan of jumping into all this if you have the time and interest to do so- it's been tickling a different part of my code brain than I've had access to in awhile, and that's been fun in and of itself.

• Go because it's easy and simple, facilitates collaboration , and also it's fast, scalable, powerful.
• Visual Studio Code because it has one of the most sophisticated Go language support plugins.
• Vim because it's Vim
• Git because it's Git
• Docker and Docker Compose because it's quick and easy to have reproducible builds/tests with them
• Arch Linux because Docker for Mac/Win is a disaster for the human nervous system, and Arch is the coolest Linux distro so far
• Stack Overflow because of Copy-Paste Driven Development
• JavaScript and Python when a something needs to be coded for yesterday
• PhpStorm because it saves me like 300 "Ctrl+F" key strokes a minute
• cURL because terminal all the way

On the backend side we started using Docker almost 2 years ago. Looking back, this was absolutely the right decision, as running things manually with so many services and so few engineers wouldn’t have been possible at all.

While in the beginning we used it mostly to ease-up local development, we have since started using it quickly to also run all of our CI & CD pipeline on top of it. This not only enabled us to speed things up drastically locally by using Docker Compose to spin up different services & dependencies and making sure they can talk to each other, but also made sure that we had reliable builds on our build infrastructure and could easily debug problems using the baked images in case anything should go wrong. Using Docker was a slight change in the beginning but we ultimately found that it forces you to think through how your services are composed and structured and thus improves the way you structure your systems.

#ContainerTools

We use docker compose to coordinate containers in out testing and stage environments. Docker Compose

Since our production deployment makes use of the Convox platform, we use this to describe the containers to be deployed via Convox to AWS ECS.

We also use this for our local dev environment (previously used vagrant with chef). Docker Compose