The Evolution of Containerization Competency

Benjamin Jordan
6 min readAug 9, 2023
From the Wellcome Collection.

I was on a bus, years ago, back when I lived in good ole’ “Silicon Valley” (rather, slightly north of it) when a stranger sat down next to me, saw that I was writing code (that’s what you do on Silicon Valley buses) and asked, emphatically, “Have you heard of Docker?” This was probably a year or two before “Docker” was on every billboard in a 20 mile radius around the Bay Area, so no, I hadn’t heard of it.

Of course, a mere twelve months later, I was told we needed “Docker experts” at [AAA GAME STUDIO YOU’VE HEARD OF] to help us deploy and scale and solve all our other problems. Get out the incense, it’s time to kneel and pay homage to Docker! We weren’t even clear on what problems Docker actually solved, we just knew we needed it. This is how Silicon Valley Tech circles work by the way: Silicon Valley is pure tech-Id.

If you’ve been around the block, you may recall that time in history. In those days, “Docker experts” were difficult to find and crazy-expensive. We were looking all over the world and we were paying through the nose.

My present self sits here, writing about itself in third-person-present, shaking its still-an-idiot-head at past-idiot-me.

Docker is not for experts

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Benjamin Jordan

Tech, thought, teaching. Total loser. Founder @SpyreIO, Adjunct @SLU. Formerly VPE @N3TWORK, CTO @Big Run Studios, CTO @Enklu, Studio Tech Director @NCSOFT.