Technologies Used

Technologies Used

We want to help as many people as possible get into technology.

That’s quite a challenge, as everyone’s coming from a different starting place, and everyone has different interests and objectives.

Even still, there are a few fundamentals you’ll need if you’d like to participate in our idea labs, and are well worth learning anyway if you’d like to work in IT.

Version Control / Git

“Git” has become the de-facto standard for version control. If you’re unfamiliar with version control, you can think of it as a way to easily save a history (or versions) of your work, combined with a managed way to share and coordinate those changes with others.

There are some good user-interfaces to make using version control in general (and git specifically) easier, but it’s absolutely worth taking the time to get a solid understanding of this.

You can find some awesome resources for learning git here

Docker / Containers

Running software consistently can be a lot more complicated than people think. There are different operating systems, environment settings, configurations, software versions, and other factors which make it tough to understand why things can work on one person’s computer but not on another.

You can think of docker as a way to bundle all of those things up in a consistent way, so you can treat any application the same.

It’s a bit more involved that, but docker is another technology worth getting really familiar with.

You can find awesome resources for docker here

Kubernetes

Once you’ve packaged your software up as a container (see Docker above), you’ll want to run it somewhere.

Kubernetes is a very powerful technology for running your containerised applications in a resiliant way. It essentially lets you treat a bunch of different computers as a “big ball of compute”. You just define what you want to run (e.g. a web server, a database, some back-end services, a scheduled job), and kubernetes makes sure that those things are deployed as you’ve defined them.

There are other ways to run containerised applications, so Kubernetes isn’t as prevalent as Docker itself, but it’s still really interesting and worth at least being aware of.

You can find some awesome resources for learning more about kubernetes here

What else?

With an understanding of git and docker, next you can read about how to participate in our labs.

I’ve you’re just getting started in IT and trying to make sense of it all, you might also be interested in “where do I start?”