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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I could go in-depth, but really, the best way I can describe my docker usage is as a simple and agnostic service manager. Let me explain.

    Docker is a container system. A container is essentially an operating system installation in a box. It’s not really a full installation, but it’s close enough that understanding it like that is fine.

    So what the service devs do is build a container (operating system image) with their service and all the required dependencies - and essentially nothing else (in order to keep the image as small as possible). A user can then use Docker to run this image on their system and have a running service in just a few terminal commands. It works the same across all distributions. So I can install whatever distro I need on the server for whatever purpose and not have to worry that it won’t run my Docker services. This also means I can test services locally on my desktop without messing with my server environment. If it works on my local Docker, it will work on my server Docker.

    There are a lot of other uses for it, like isolated development environments and testing applications using other Linux distro libraries, to name a couple, but again, I personally mostly just use it as a simple service manager.

    tldr + eli5 - App devs said “works on my machine”, so Docker lets them ship their machine.



  • The reason this works well for certain applications and not others comes down to programming language / framework and compilation optimization.

    If the application was compiled directly into an executable binary and optimized, it can be decompiled, but it won’t be human-readable. Programmers would have to delve in and manually trace the code paths to figure out how it works. Fun fact, this is how a lot of the retro game decompilation projects are happening. Teams of volunteers are going through the unreadable decompilations and working together to figure them out.

    Dotnet and Java based applications are easier, because they don’t usually get directly compiled into machine-executable binaries, and even when they do, it’s still easy to decompile them. This is because they’re both compiled to an intermediate language that’s more optimized than the original, then that IL is run by a runtime. Dotnet’s IL is called Common Intermediate Language and Java’s is called bytecode. This sounds weird, but it’s kinda cool, because it lets people write different languages without having to have a full compiler. They just have to be able to get it compiled to an intermediate language, and then the existing runtime can take it from there.