For the weekend: The absolute beginner’s guide to Docker
Hello Indie Hackers,
during the last year I've used Docker extensively for pretty much all my development needs. This is surprising because initially I was opposed to jumping onto the newest bandwagons and wanted to keep things simple and understandable. It turns out that Docker makes things more simple! Especially dev environments.
So I've been bouncing around this idea in my head about writing an article that I wished I had when I tried to grasp what all the jazz about Docker was, before I had any understanding on the subject.
Yesterday I had a sudden surge of inspiration and wrote that article:
https://shipmight.com/blog/absolute-beginners-guide-docker.html
I hope it helps other people to have that Aha! moment with Docker. My goal was to be very practical, and to explain just enough concepts so the practical examples make sense and the reader understands what they are doing.
Let me know if I missed anything, or if you have any other comments! I would like to improve this article or write follow-ups if there are any topics to expand.
I've had a quick read through it and originally was a little weary it would be too high level as I tend to find that most "Hello World" examples I've come across get across the very basics but can be difficult to translate to real-world use cases.
I was glad to see you expand on this and include examples of Postgres, MySQL, Nginx, database environment variable usages which make it much more relatable to real-world use cases readers would likely be trying to work with.
The post is quite long (there is a lot to the topic, even the basics) and I almost jumped away from the page and missed those expanded examples so I would suggest that towards the top of the article you add a list of the sections you are going to cover so that the reader knows what content they are expecting to see right away. I would also use this as navigation links so the reader could click them and be jumped down the page to the relevant section.
I hope this is useful
Thanks for the feedback Chris, very useful! You raise a great point. I added a list of Contents in the beginning so visitors will see at a glimpse what is included, and can jump to an interesting section if they don't feel like scrolling through everything.
Once you get the hang of Docker, it can be quite addicting to keep using it for all the things :)
Keep hearing good things about Docker and as usual I am late to the new and shiny thing party. But it sounds like it's very worthwhile learning. I'll take a look at your article over the weekend and see how I can implement into my projects. Cheers.
Your feedback would be very valuable. Let me know if I can improve the article in any way for newcomers!