Fixing Docker Local Dev Setup for Go API

Docker in Local Development: Theory vs Harsh Reality At work I recently got an unusual task — to extend the API of a service written in Go. I had absolutely no experience with Go before. In fact, I had never even studied its syntax. However, using AI, the goal was to modify a few methods without deeply diving into the language itself. Overall, I can’t say it was particularly difficult. The syntax is different from the languages I’m used to, but if you already have development experience, it’s fairly intuitive. What turned out to be far more interesting was how the developer who previously worked on this project ran it locally. When you learn Docker, one of the main ideas is that a project should run inside containers everywhere, regardless of the real environment. But in this project I couldn’t find a docker-compose file, which already seemed strange. At first I assumed the developer probably had a docker-compose setup for local development on his machine and simply forgot to add it to the repository. But after talking to him, it became clear that the situation was much more interesting: he runs the project locally without containers, installing the entire infrastructure manually on his machine. Moreover, he runs the service without debugging. And every new developer is expected to repeat the same process from scratch. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. The legend about environment-independent setups and quick project onboarding completely fell apart when faced with reality. Naturally, I wasn’t willing to accept that situation, so I decided to fix it. As a result, I set up everything needed for local development: running the project via Docker debugging with Delve hot reload Now all that headache is a thing of the past. #Docker #LocalDevelopment #DevOps #CI_CD #Microservices #HighLoadApplications #FrontendEngineering #FullstackDevelopment #NextJS #ReactJS #TypeScript #SoftwareArchitecture #SystemDesign #CodeQuality #Observability #Debugging #HotReload

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