Containers
Containers
[White Hat is sitting at a laptop. Cueball is standing behind him.] White Hat: Man, Docker is being used for everything . White Hat: I don't know how I feel about it. Cueball: Story time!
[Cueball is standing by himself.] Cueball: Once, long ago, I wanted to use an old tablet as a wall display.
[A picture of Cueball's imagined tablet with two applications open side by side. The app on the left is "LiveCam". The app on the right is Google Calendar.] Cueball: I had an app and a calendar webpage that I wanted to show side by side, but the OS didn't have split-screen support. Cueball: So I decided to build my own app.
[White Hat and Cueball as before, but White Hat has turned to face Cueball.] Cueball: I downloaded the SDK and the IDE, registered as a developer, and started reading the language's docs.
[A picture of two smartphones glued together side by side, held on a backing board. The same two applications shown earlier are open on different phones.] Cueball: ...Then I realized it would be way easier to get two smaller phones on eBay and glue them together. Cueball: On that day, I achieved software enlightenment.
[White Hat and Cueball still facing each other, with White Hat's arm resting on the back of the chair.] White Hat: But you never learned to write software. Cueball: No, I just learned how to glue together stuff that I don't understand. White Hat: I...OK, fair.

Docker is a computer program that performs operating-system-level virtualization also known as containerization. White Hat notices that many people are using Docker for "everything," implying that he does not understand what all the fuss is about. Cueball then explains the fundamental idea behind Docker with a simple story.
He notes how difficult it can be to combine two programs and have them work together as one. This is something all programmers can relate to. His specific example is to get two separate programs to display side-by-side on a tablet. The main joke is that Cueball's solution is a surprising twist to solving the problem. Instead of writing a lot of complicated code to deal with the problem at hand, he sidesteps the problem by using two separate devices, literally gluing them together. Containerization software, like Docker, uses the same general idea but the "glue" and the "multiple computers" are done in software, instead of literally gluing two computers together.
Cueball states that he achieved "software enlightenment" when he "solved" the problem by sidestepping it.
White Hat's initial confusion comes from the fact that Cueball did not write any software, yet achieved "software enlightenment." A good programmer doesn't necessarily need to be able to write programs or even understand how they work, provided that they have the skills needed to combine existing programs to solve tasks. An alternate interpretation is that someone with little programming experience is able to create a working program simply by copy/pasting code snippets from a coding site such as Stack Overflow and "gluing" them together without really understanding how they work.
The title text makes a joke about developers writing code for use in a containerized environment. The ideal is to only write " microservices " which are modules that do just one thing and do it well. The joke here is that even when a module does many different things, you can pretend it is a "microservice" by just ignoring all of its features but one (hopefully one that it does well).
[White Hat is sitting at a laptop. Cueball is standing behind him.] White Hat: Man, Docker is being used for everything . White Hat: I don't know how I feel about it. Cueball: Story time!
[Cueball is standing by himself.] Cueball: Once, long ago, I wanted to use an old tablet as a wall display.
[A picture of Cueball's imagined tablet with two applications open side by side. The app on the left is "LiveCam". The app on the right is Google Calendar.] Cueball: I had an app and a calendar webpage that I wanted to show side by side, but the OS didn't have split-screen support. Cueball: So I decided to build my own app.
[White Hat and Cueball as before, but White Hat has turned to face Cueball.] Cueball: I downloaded the SDK and the IDE, registered as a developer, and started reading the language's docs.
[A picture of two smartphones glued together side by side, held on a backing board. The same two applications shown earlier are open on different phones.] Cueball: ...Then I realized it would be way easier to get two smaller phones on eBay and glue them together. Cueball: On that day, I achieved software enlightenment.
[White Hat and Cueball still facing each other, with White Hat's arm resting on the back of the chair.] White Hat: But you never learned to write software. Cueball: No, I just learned how to glue together stuff that I don't understand. White Hat: I...OK, fair.
