Utilize Docker To Speed Up The Onboard Process

The onboarding process is about how fast a new hire could start contributing to our organization. In this case of the individual contributor (IC), how fast a new IC could start pull requests and deploy to our production. That being said, the onboarding process consists of setting up local development, understand the git-flow, has gasp knowledge in the business jargon, and so on. In this article, we’ll focus on how to utilize docker to speed up setting up local development.

The main pain point of setting up a local development is we hardly provide onboarding docs that cover all possibilities of our new hire local setup. Even two-person running the same OS could be encounter different problems. Installing message broker and Redis server could be challenging, even blockers to some of our new IC. That come docker to help us to set up those pre-requirement.

At Oy Indonesia, we enforce our IC to be able to run and test the code at their local environment before testing at the development server. It means all of our IC must be able to install and run Postgres, RabbitMQ, and two types of Redis servers in their local environment. That a lot of resources to be installed and by using Docker we could eliminate the need to install all of them.

Using Dockers for local development is easy and straightforward. first thing first, new IC need to install docker on their local machine. Our recommendation is to install Docker desktop for Mac and Windows, and docker engine for Ubuntu and another distro. For this article, we going walkthrough through windows installation. Follow this step here https://docs.docker.com/desktop/windows/install. Make sure docker is installed by

docker -v

After that, we need to install docker-compose. Follow this step here https://docs.docker.com/compose/install/. Make sure docker-compose is installed by

docker-compose -v

Last, they only need to import and start our docker-yml file at our repo and they are ready to start.

In conclusion, using docker for setting up local development has simplified our onboarding process at Oy Indonesia. Our new hire used to install 4–5 applications before they could start contributing. Now, they only need to install docker.