As a consequence of years spent doing software development, I am probably a little too wary of relying on anything. I’ve gotten burned so many times by making a given project or library or tool a cornerstone only to have to replace it later. I also don’t like the idea of picking one tool, figuring out that I prefer something else, and then having to rip out and replace (so much github actions YAML I’ve ported now…).
But failing to commit comes with subtle costs too. It’s nice to have something that I know I can pick off the shelf and use right away rather than needing to ponder my options. Also getting some depth in the ecosystem and functionality of a particular tool is the most valuable thing in the long run. Most of the time I’d be better off with expert knowledge of an imperfect tool over a journeyman’s understanding of the latest and greatest.
So with that in mind I have a couple of tech commitments that I think I’m ready to make:
First off, for running my own local containers, I’m ready to call it for plain old docker. There was a while when I was really hoping that one of the alternatives would take off as an easily packaged way to get up and running. I’m happy that the technology is open enough that docker has competitors, but it still feels like using anything else leaves me cobbling the legos together for upside that is mostly hypothetical.
Second, I’m gonna be using caddy as an HTTPS server as much as I can going forward. It’s hard to move on from nginx because it’s just been so so reliable for me. But caddy really raises the bar when it comes to making the easy things easy. Nginx config is hairy enough that I don’t want to do anything with it, whereas caddy extensions are actually pretty convenient. We’ll see if this one burns me, but for now I’m endorsing the challenger.