I'm a big fan of docker and mainly just want to say thanks for bringing it about.

I remember my first time trying to use a container was about 2015 on a beach cafe's wifi in Bocas del Toro, Panama. You can imagine how it went...

After a brief hiatus though I was back to it and since then it's been a core part of many a local dev stack and even production stack (compose) I've set up. I recall the magic moment for me being when I first realised you could mount src to use all your local native dev tools while completely virtualising everything else, including and especially whatever combo of runtimes and dependencies you need.

It was just a lightbulb moment, like it entirely solves 'works on my machine', setting new people up on a project, it just seems like how software engineering ought to work and once you have experienced it it's difficult to go back.

I'm curious, as its creator are you still using it, or as someone who can clearly look ahead to experimental ways of doing things are you on to the next thing whatever that may be? If so, what is it? :-)

Thank you for inventing Docker, it truly changed the life of many developers.

I was there when dotCloud announced Docker in 2013 and it was truly pragmatic. I had previously burned my hands on LXC, Juju Charms and Vagrant to containerize the apps, but it was all a house of cards. I remember helping a friend ship his whole Vagrant Box to the interview panel for a job!

It’s incredible to think about how much boilerplate Docker removed right at it's launch. Thank you.

I was in the audience when you gave the 5-minute docker lightning talk at PyCon US Santa Clara in 2013. I remember chatting with a friend/colleague about it (https://nvie.com/about/) and we both agreed it was the most interesting lightning talk that day.

What’s funny, though, is that since it was “just” a lightning talk, it didn’t even make it into the roundup of notes I sent to my team after PyCon. But a mere year later, Docker was how my team (and seemingly everyone else) ran projects locally.

Any interesting memories from that day in 2013? From your perspective, what happened in the year that followed that caused docker to be adopted so widely? Were there other key moments or turning points?

Hi, question from a sysadmin / network engineer. Why localhost with port forwarding? Why not native mechanism like routing and mdns? I’ve gave Docker and other container managers which do networking the same way a try a few times and I always found the network unnecessarily complicated. Eventually I came across OrbStack which uses the aforementioned mechanisms. Every container gets an IP address in the local bridge and responds to mdsns queries. This plays especially well in “compose” scenario when services on containers can all use original port numbers. And containers can be accessed with hostnames, so there won’t be conflict between port numbers especially if I run multiple composed stacks.

I'm curious what made think of it in the first place? What was your thought process that made you think that these Linux primitives give the opportunity to make it a platform for distributing and deploying packaged applications and eliminating a lot of the issue around "it works my machine" argument?

You may have already answered this somewhere, so feel free to tell me what to search for or if you have a link to hand, that works too :)

Given all the popularity and use cases you know today. Is there any fundamental design choice you would have done differently?

Thank you for docker.

Went from the good old days of vagrant (xen/kvm) to lxc/lxd to docker, and docker truly clicked all the way from development to production.

But honestly, thanks to Docker hub even more. The CLI is only one part of the puzzle, the worldwide registry is an immense undertaking.

Thanks for making so many lives easier!

Docker is probably the highest-profile software written in Go. Are you happy with that choice? Would you do it in Rust if it was available at the time, or Zug?

So you are responsible for my career and the reason i can put food on my table. Thank you.

People are underestimating now big of a tech shift it was back in the day.

I remember going to a demo of Docker in South Carolina before it hit 1.0. Came back and wrote the “Docker is the Heroku Killer” article on my blog and it was the first thing I wrote that made the front page of HN.

Docker ended up as a primary way of delivering, packaging applications etc., for the web and beyond.

What was your imagined use case when you first came up with it?

Did you think Docker as it is used in the industry right now is where you imagined it would be used?

Any use cases for it that the industry missed but you think would have made things even better?

Thank you.

For one, did you get rich beyond all comprehension and did you start a band with your wealth?

Second, do you still program ?

I was lucky enough to get in this industry when Docker was new. Sure beats trying to figure out why X happens on machine A and doesn’t on machine B.

Thanks for making Docker :)

Prior to the creation of Docker, did you have experience with other containerization technologies like Solaris Zones and FreeBSD Jails?

Did you at some point, either prior to or after making Docker for Linux, consider building something like Docker on top of FreeBSD Jails?

As a user of both Linux and FreeBSD, running Docker containers and Jails on each of them respectively, it would be interesting to see what FreeBSD Jails could be with something like Docker built on top of it while also taking advantage of other features on FreeBSD like fully using ZFS snapshots, ZFS send/recv, ZFS clone, vnet, and so on. Such that spinning up a container would under the hood receive ZFS snapshots from the “Docker registry” equivalent server, and it might clone the snapshot locally before starting up a container instance so that multiple container instances would be using the same locally available ZFS snapshot that was received once from the “Docker registry” equivalent.

How did MirageOS end up powering parts of Docker stack?

What made you decide to use a URI as the namespace for images? I like it, but I think it's been very misunderstood which has caused people to dislike it.

Would you consider writing Docker/moby in a different language, if you were to create it scratch today?

I was a dotcloud customer around 2012. You might have responded to one of my many support emails.

General question. When you were designing Docker, did you anticipate the success it would achieve?

I hope one day I can say something like “I made Docker” :,)

Were you around for the big Moby open sourcing? What went down from your perspective? If I recall, it was a fairly dramatic move that was not driven by the interests of Docker corp.

I’d love to hear more about some limitations/tradeoffs of docker that you made at the time that you regret in hindsight. Was there anything that you wish didn’t get baked into the “default norms” for containers, or areas that would benefit from more attention and redesigns?

I’ve been following dagger and it’s been really interesting to see the evolution of the design, and new set of abstractions. There’s also nix which has seen popularity, with their approach of building layered oci containers.

Given how things have changed since your creation and the way things are going, are there any things you would have done differently?

Thanks for your innovation and helping developers! If Docker hasn't been your focus in recent years, what have you mainly been working on and what's been your favorite?

Not related to the topic but. Do you have any book recommendations? Not necessarily programming or system related, looking for great books ~

Thanks for developing such a valuable tool!

basically my whole career has revolved around being good with docker and other related tech, so thank you! started on 0.7 :D

A while back you had this tweet which often gets cited, or at least _i_ personally think about it a lot.

> If WASM+WASI existed in 2008, we wouldn't have needed to created Docker. That's how important it is. Webassembly on the server is the future of computing. A standardized system interface was the missing link. Let's hope WASI is up to the task!

How are you feeling about WASI today?

How does it feel to have fundamentally changed how many/most enterprise software runs?

I like to tell people the story of how I got a pre-release peek and frankly didn't understand what I was looking at. You emailed me in reply to a comment I made around that time[0].

Funny how little has changed except the names, I guess.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5347255

I am firmly convinced that had Rust been more mature at the time, the pivot from Python would have beem into Rust instead of Go.

Am I on the right track?

Do you think e.g. students learning docker syntax at a uni is beneficial in 2026 or you think LLM-assisted programming means that Docker will become an abstraction under an abstraction and its setup will be mostly automated by LLMs? I find myself very rarely debugging or handwriting dockerfiles nowadays!

If you were implementing an operating system (free from compatibility concerns), what would you do differently to better support lightweight containers?

What learnings did you take from Docker when conceiving Dagger? Or is it more about unlocking BuildKit?

Oh wow, hi! I think my biggest “gripe” with docker is that everyone grabs it as a hammer and views many problems as a nail. Am I way off base with that? What was your original vision for how docker might be used in the wild?

Thanks but I still run LXCs /s

You're a genius well done making containerization actually happen.

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