Developing in Containers: Dev Containers and GitHub Codespaces

6PM - 7PM: Social Hour (note - food and beverage will not be provided this month.)
7PM - 8PM: Presentation
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Why does setting up a development environment still take longer than fixing the bug you were hired to fix? From inconsistent dependencies to configuration drift, local dev setups tend to be fragile and time-consuming. But it doesn't have to be. This session looks at two tools that aim to fix that: Dev Containers and GitHub Codespaces. Using them can bring real, practical improvements to how your team writes code.

We will start with Dev Containers, the open standard for defining repeatable, containerized development environments using simple JSON and Dockerfiles. Then we will show how GitHub Codespaces builds on this concept by delivering those environments in the cloud that is accessible instantly from any machine with no setup required.

You'll get to see:

The problem Dev Containers and Codespaces aim to solve
Anatomy of a devcontainer.json: building blocks of a consistent dev environment
Running Dev Containers locally vs. running them in the cloud with Codespaces
Setting up Codespaces: repository configuration, resource sizing, and access patterns
Connecting to Codespaces via the browser or VS Code desktop
Shared environments across teams: using the same config on every machine
Limitations, tradeoffs, and when not to use Codespaces or Dev Containers