When acquiring our company, Solomon took us to a remote farm in France for a week for an offsite, fed us fantastic food and wine, and the first prototype of that Docker for Mac VM was working by the end of the week! It took a few months to hack together the shell. There's a video of Solomon and the pinãta launch party on my blog ;-) https://anil.recoil.org/notes/cacm-docker-cover#getting-invo...
There was a whole other slice of work we did for project Piñata too in the form of datakit (https://github.com/moby/datakit) that was well ahead of its time. I was looking at this archived code again just last week while thinking about agentic git workflows!
I am having a blast working on environmental science these days, and we’re long overdue a beer next in SF!
Am firing up Dagger to give it a try on our geospatial workflows for the first time just now; it’s got the same attention to CLI detail as Docker 1.0 did :-)
> Docker Linux have not been using microVMs for a decade.
You sure could. Kata containers have been around for a long time; I remember putting them into production back in 2017 or so (and dealing with filesystem forwarding issues).
https://lwn.net/Articles/755230/
I do think this was well ahead of its time. Under the hood, we designed a Linux distro called LinuxKit (https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit) which ran every process in its own mount namespace (including the init process), and had a deterministic build with hashes. As far as I can tell, it's still pretty hard to get this experience even with Nix in 2026.
The boot time was also quick enough to be entirely in parallel and so not be noticeable (the 'bounce time' of the application on Mac was one bounce!)
There's a full terminal implementation of Bonsai as well. I actually use it in my personal workflow these days to manage my contacts database! https://anil.recoil.org/notes/aoah-2025-9
Custom infrastructure; I use my site as a playground for various things over the years. It ran as the first MirageOS unikernel for many years, and recently it's been running on a zero-allocation OxCaml webserver https://anil.recoil.org/notes/oxcaml-httpz to help me get to grips with the new extensions.
Fun is, by far, the biggest reason I can identify why I work on some open source projects and not others these days! I think it was also true in the past, but to a lesser extent. Docker circa 2015 never felt like a job at all and the early Dockercons werre a thing of legendary entertainment!
A couple of things have possibly conspired to make more established projects less fun in the past few years:
- we're getting older; as maintainers age, I find it's just harder to make time to go to hackathons and socialise with the younger generation, much as I would love to. Too much real life stuff on. The pandemic also established a 'before/after' and conferences just haven't been the same level since for me. I'm not sure if I changed or the conferences did.
- obviously LLMs, since they add a layer of interferences between both the demands on my maintainer time (LLM generated PRs) but also how much I need to interact with other people to solve a problem. I made plenty of online friends over the past three decades figuring stuff out together over some obscure library, but group debugging seems less important now if you can chuck it at Fable.
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