Let’s imagine you want to play with a new language or technology. To do this you need:

1. Some tutorial or exercise or katas/koans
2. Development environment… and it is not that simple

Side note : possible candidates for exercise are: MAL, todomvc, hnpwa, realworld.

Development environment

When I want to play - I want to jump directly to coding. I don’t want to figure out what is the state of the art for tooling. I don’t want to spend hours installing tools and configuring IDE. I don’t want to break any existing dev environments or remember which things to uninstall after the experiment.

Visual Studio Code Remote Containers is a solution to the problem if you already use VS Code and Docker. It takes no time to spin up a new development environment with preconfigured tooling. This is what I call “Truly Integrated Development Environment”.

I’ve been working with it for a couple of weeks and so far the experience was delightful. So I decided to collect recipes for dev containers for my future experiments: Awesome VS Code Containers.

PS

I already tried out Pony. Next, I want to play with Crystal, Unison, Racket, and Haskell. With what technology or language do you want to experiment?

Happy hacking!