A few months ago we sit together to rethink our local development at Productboard. Product teams delivered features that relied now on more than one backend service and our set of bash scripts and docker-compose files stopped working. We decided to replace it with deployments to the local Kubernetes cluster in Docker Desktop to bring the local environment closer to production. And adopt Tilt to improve the developer experience.

Docker has long established itself as a standard for containerization and local development. So much that one would almost take it for granted, just like bash or basic UNIX commands. But with announced updates to Docker Desktop terms & conditions, it made me think: Can we even breathe without it on Macs, especially when we need to run multiple services locally? Let's explore possible alternatives...

Unit tests can excel as your additional documentation. Or be a total mess, just like the rest of the codebase, when "staff" culture isn't that good. See some tips I collected with time to keep the bar high, without scratching the head when tests suddenly fail.

Emails as a crucial part of the customer journey? Well-known puzzle, especially for all of us working on B2C projects, e.g., in the e-commerce or travel sector. We'd been working on such features, and what always puzzled me how much time we spent making sure we aren't introducing any regression repeatedly. We can send an incorrect email only once.

Fortunately, we realized emails today are nothing but an HTML page. And Cypress excels in that.

It's been three years since a colleague approached me with the seemingly casual question: "Hey, we're initiating a new project and need someone who will lead it technically. Would you be interested?". "For sure!" I didn't have to think about it twice.

How much time do we spend on making the web more accessible? And how much on supporting outdated browsers like IE? The chances are that more of our visitors would likely benefit from improvements in the accessibility area, but they are invisible to our statistics and error reporting.

Late evening calls, reverted releases, lost revenue, and eventually fear of touching anything in legacy code not to break something. Nobody likes that. Do you know what is one of the best ways to avoid this? Integration tests!